Emergency teams break down pieces of wreckage at the site of a commercial plane crash in Taipei, Taiwan, Thursday, Feb. 5, 2015. AP
TAIPEI, Taiwan— Moments before the TransAsia Airways propjet banked sharply and crashed into a river, one of its pilots said, “Mayday, mayday, engine flameout,” according to an aviation official who declined to comment on a possible cause for the accident.
At least 32 people on board the ATR 72 were killed and 15 survivors were injured in the crash in Taiwan’s capital, the latest in a series of aircraft disasters linked to Asian airlines. Divers were searching in the river for the remaining 11 people on board, including the two pilots. The plane’s black boxes was found overnight.
“Engine flameout” refers to flames being extinguished in the combustion chamber of the engine, so that it shuts down and no longer drives the propeller. Causes could include a lack of fuel or being struck by volcanic ash, a bird or some other object. “Mayday” is an international distress call.
Video images of Flight 235’s final moments in the air captured on car dashboard cameras appear to show the left engine’s propeller at standstill as the aircraft turned sharply, its wings going vertical and clipping a highway bridge before plunging into the Keelung River in Taipei on Wednesday.
An audio recording of the pilot’s communications with the control tower at takeoff and during the brief, minutes-long flight were widely broadcast. A Taiwan Civil Aeronautical Administration official who declined to be named confirmed the distress call and its wording Thursday, but did not say how it might relate to a cause for the crash.
About 10 Taipei fire agency divers were looking for any more bodies that may be at the cold river bottom. A crane was used to bring the rear section of the plane to the shore Wednesday night. The fuselage of the turbo-propeller jet was largely dismantled by hydraulic rescue tools and now lay alongside recovered luggage.
At midday Thursday, about a dozen relatives of Taiwanese victims arrived at the riverbank in the capital to perform traditional mourning rituals. Accompanied by Buddhist monks ringing brass bells, they bowed toward the river and held aloft cloth inscriptions tied to pieces of bamboo meant to guide the spirits of the dead to rest.
(Raised) Relatives of some of the 31 passengers from mainland China will reach Taipei on a charter flight Thursday afternoon.
Police diver Cheng Ying-chih said search and rescue efforts were being hampered by “zero visibility” in the turbid river and cold water temperatures that were forcing divers to work on one-hour shifts.
He said the front of the plane had broken into numerous pieces, making the job all the more difficult.
“We’re looking at a very tough search and rescue job,” Cheng told reporters gathered on the river bank beside the wreckage where luggage had been removed and placed in neat rows.
The mangled rear part of the fuselage lay upside down, its wings and tail assembly sheared off and multiple holes torn into its side.
The pilots’ actions in the flights final moments have led to speculation that they attempted to avoid high-rise buildings by following the line of the river and then banked sharply in an attempt to bring it down in the water rather than crash on land. Taiwan’s aviation authority said it had no evidence of that.
Both the administration and Taipei-based TransAsia Airways declined to speculate on causes for the crash at about 10:55 a.m. Wednesday near the downtown airport.
The ATR 72-600 is the most modern version of the plane, and the pilot had 4,900 hours of flying experience, said Lin Chih-ming of the Civil Aeronautics Administration.
The plane has a generally good reputation for safety and reliability and is known among airlines for being cheap and efficient to use, said Greg Waldron, Asia managing editor at Flightglobal magazine in Singapore. About 1,200 of the planes are currently in use worldwide.
A team from ATR, a French-Italian company based in Toulouse, France, was being sent to Taiwan to help in the investigation.
The crashed aircraft, less than a year old, had once changed an engine, TransAsia Airways Vice President Wang Cheng-chung told a news conference Wednesday. He said the original one was returned to the manufacturer, Pratt & Whitney Canada, after a glitch was found.
“P&WC gave a complete, brand new engine to TransAsia . and installed it for us,” Wang said.
The engine was replaced in April before the aircraft went into use, an airline publicist said.
The accident is one of a string of aviation disasters to strike Asian carriers.
On Dec. 28, low-cost airline AirAsia lost its first plane in the Java Sea with 162 people on board. In July, another ATR 72 operated by TransAsia crashed in the outlying Taiwan-controlled islands of Penghu, killing 48 at the end of a typhoon.
Malaysia Airlines has lost two planes in tragic circumstances: One plane carrying 298 people was shot down over rebel-held eastern Ukraine in July, and four months earlier Flight 370 disappeared on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in one of aviation’s most confounding mysteries. No trace of the plane with 239 people aboard has been found.
The 15 survivors were pulled from the open door of a relatively unscathed portion of the fuselage that was jutting above the river’s surface after the crash.
Among the survivors was a family of three, including a 2-year-old boy whose heart stopped beating after three minutes under water. He recovered after receiving CPR, his uncle Lin Ming-yi told reporters.
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