One of the bodies was recovered Thursday from the cabin of the ATR 72 twin-engine turboprop aircraft, which had earlier been hauled out of the Keelung River in Taipei, the Taiwanese capital, CNA reported.
But the agency said rescuers fear those still unaccounted for may have drifted downstream toward the larger Tamsui River.
‘I thought something’s wrong with the engine’
Some of the survivors have begun to give their accounts of the disaster in which the aircraft clipped a bridge before plunging into the river.
And a recording from the cockpit of the plane captured someone making a mayday call because of an engine problem shortly before the crash.
Huang Chin-shun, a 72-year-old survivor, told CNN affiliate ETTV from his hospital bed that he sensed something was amiss soon after takeoff.
“I thought something’s wrong with the engine because I always take this flight,” he said.
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The TransAsia crash is the latest in a number of plane disasters involving Asian carriers.
AirAsia Flight QZ8501 crashed on December 28 as it flew from the Indonesian city of Surabaya toward Singapore. There were 162 people on board.
In July, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people aboard.
TransAsia was involved in another deadly disaster in July of last year. Forty-eight people died on TransAsia Airways Flight 222, another ATR 72 aircraft, as it was attempting to land in the Taiwanese Penghu Islands during bad weather.
TransAsia had lost two other ATR 72s previously — one that crashed in the mountains in 1995, killing the four crew members on board, and one that crashed into the sea in 2002, killing the two pilots, according to CNA.
The biggest recent mystery has been the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. It disappeared on March 8, 2014, and has not been found.
CNN’s Elizabeth Joseph and Katie Hunt contributed to this report.
