Rescuers were searching for 12 people Thursday morning after using a crane to hoist the fuselage of a wrecked TransAsia Airways plane from a shallow river in Taiwan’s capital following a crash that killed at least 31 others.
Flight 235 with 58 people aboard — many of them travelers from China — banked sharply on its side Wednesday shortly after takeoff from Taipei, clipped a highway bridge and then careened into the Keelung River.
Rescue personnel carry a passenger from a TransAsia ATR 72-600 turboprop plane that crash-landed into the Keelung River. (Photo by SAM YEH/AFP/Getty Images)
Rescuers in rubber rafts pulled 15 people alive from the wreckage during daylight. After dark, they brought in the crane, and the death toll was expected to rise once crews were able to search through submerged portions of the fuselage, which came to rest a few dozen meters (yards) from the shore.
Dramatic video clips apparently taken from cars were posted online and aired by broadcasters, showing the ATR 72 propjet as it pivoted onto its side while zooming toward a traffic bridge over the river. In one of them, the plane rapidly fills the frame as its now-vertical wing scrapes over the road, hitting a vehicle before heading into the river.
Speculation cited in local media said the crew may have turned sharply to follow the line of the river to avoid crashing into a high-rise residential area, but Taiwan’s aviation authority said it had no evidence of that.
Taiwanese broadcasters repeatedly played a recording of the plane’s final contact with the control tower in which the crew called out “Mayday” three times. The recording offered no direct clues as to why the plane was in distress.
It was the airline’s second French-Italian-built ATR 72 to crash in the past year. Wednesday’s flight had taken off at 11:53 a.m. from Taipei’s downtown Sungshan Airport en route to the outlying Taiwanese-controlled Kinmen islands. The crew issued the mayday call shortly after takeoff, Taiwanese civil aviation authorities said.
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Greg Waldron, Asia managing editor at Flightglobal magazine in Singapore, said the ATR 72-600 is the latest iteration of one of the most popular turboprop planes in the world, particularly favored for regional short-hop flights in Asia.
It has a generally good reputation for safety and reliability and is known among airlines for being cheap and efficient to operate.
While it’s too early to say what caused the crash, engine trouble or weight shifting were unlikely to be causes, Waldron said. Other possible factors include pilot error, weather or freak incidents such as bird strikes.
“It’s too early now to speculate on whether it was an issue with the aircraft or crew,” Waldron said.
The accessibility of the crash site should allow for a swift investigation, and an initial report should be available within about a month, Waldron said.
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Associated Press writers Christopher Bodeen, Ian Mader and Didi Tang in Beijing, and Greg Keller in Paris contributed to this report.
