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TransAsia Airways plane crashes on landing in Taiwan, killing at least 48
By Philip Wen
Beijing: Taiwanese investigators have been dispatched to the outlying island of Penghu to determine the cause of a domestic passenger jet crash which killed at least 48 people on Wednesday.
The TransAsia Airways Flight 222 crash-landed in inclement weather into a village barely three kilometres shy from the airport at its intended destination, Makong Island, in the strait that separates Taiwan from mainland China.
Fifty-eight passengers and crew were on board the 70-seat twin-engine turboprop ATR 72 plane; all were Taiwanese except for two French nationals.
Distressing scenes played out as distraught relatives seeking information on their loved ones rushed to hospitals and Kaohsiung Airport, where the plane was delayed for nearly two hours because of bad weather before taking off – the short flight was only scheduled to take 35 minutes.
"It was thunderstorm conditions during the crash," said Hsi Wen-guang, a spokesman for the local fire department.
Local television showed one woman, Hsu Yu-jie, a 34-year-old employee of the Penghu County accounting and statistics department, collapsing in tears as airline personnel tried to console her. “My daughter,” she said, sobbing.The crash occurred during the plane’s second attempt at landing after pilots aborted the first landing, reportedly due to poor visibility.
Taiwan had shut its financial markets and schools in the preceding two days as the island was hit by Typhoon Matmo. But it had passed the island and was heading into China, downgraded from typhoon to tropical storm at the time of the crash.
Tributes flowed for the victims of the crash, which included an army captain, and a family of six from Makong, including newlywed Chan Yun-ching, who had been married just 10 days.
“Chan’s daughter only got married recently and they’ve suffered such misfortune, it’s terribly sad,” the mayor of Makong, Su Kun-hsiung, told Taiwanese newspaper UDN.
Chang Lan-hsin, a professor of foreign languages at the National Kaohsiung University, choked back tears as he told reporters that his student Chan Ya-ni had only last year beaten cancer into remission, and had posted “it’s good to be alive” on Facebook before her flight.
Villagers at the site of the crash described seeing the plane “plummet” from the sky, crashing into houses below and erupting into flames. As many as five people at ground level were injured by the crash.
“I heard a huge crash,” said one villager, named as Mr Wang, on Taiwan’s TVBS. “At first I thought it was thunder but then I smelt gas. Then I saw the fire outside and there were passengers covered in blood crawling from the plane.”
The Civil Aeronautics Administration said earlier in the day that weather conditions at the time did not exceed international regulations for landing. Visibility was 1600 metres with cloud cover as low as 600 metres.
It is unclear at the moment whether the plane crash was a result of inclement weather or human error, accord to the administration's head, Wang Hsing-chung.
Television networks aired footage of TransAsia's president, Chooi Yee-choong, bowing in apology. "We express our deepest apologies to everyone for this unfortunate event."
TransAsia said the pilot, Lee Yi-liang, 60, had a flight operation experience of 22 years, while that of co-pilot Chiang Kuan-hsing, 39, was 2.5 years.
Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou and Chinese President Xi Jinping also expressed condolences and “deep grief”, in separate statements.
With Sanghee Liu and agencies