Click to see pictures of rescue efforts
TAIPEI // At least 26 people died and 15 survived a spectacular air crash on Wednesday when a Taiwanese passenger aircraft carrying 58 people turned on its side in mid-air, clipped an elevated motorway and cartwheeled into a shallow river.
Rescuers used a crane to hoist the fuselage from the Keelung River as they searched into the night for 17 missing people.
Dramatic video clips taken from cars on the motorway showed the ATR 72 twin-engine turboprop jet as it pivoted on to its side. The wing scrapes over the road and hits a taxi before the aircraft crashes into the river.
TransAsia Airways Flight GE235 had taken off at 11.35am from Sungshan Airport in Taipei en route to the outlying Taiwanese-controlled Kinmen islands.
The pilot issued a mayday call shortly after take-off.
Contact with the aircraft was lost four minutes after take-off, but weather conditions were suitable for flying and the cause of the accident was unknown.
“This aircraft in the accident was the newest model. It hadn’t been used for even a year,” said TransAsia director Peter Chen.
Taiwan’s civil aeronautics administration said 19 people were confirmed dead, 15 were injured and 24 were still missing.
Thirty-one of the passengers were from China. Wu Jun-hong, a fire department official coordinating the rescue, said the missing people were either still in the fuselage or had been pulled down the river.
“At the moment, things don’t look too optimistic,” Mr Wu said. “Those in the front of the plane are likely to have lost their lives.”
Rescuers were pulling baggage from an open plane door to clear the fuselage and planned to build a pontoon bridge to facilitate those efforts.
The aircraft’s wing hit a taxi on the motorway, injuring the driver and a passenger.
Taiwan’s ministry of national defence sent 165 people and eight boats to the riverside rescue scene, joining fire department rescue crews.
It was the airline’s second French-Italian-built ATR 72 to crash in the past year.
Forty-eight people were killed in the previous crash in the outlying Taiwan-controlled islands of Penghu last July at the end of a typhoon. The reasons for the crash remain under investigation.
ATR, a French-Italian consortium based in Toulouse, France, said it was sending a team to Taiwan to assist the investigation.
The ATR 72-600 aircraft that crashed on Wednesday was ATR’s best plane model, and the pilot had 4,900 hours of flying experience, said Lin Chih-ming of the civil aeronautics administration.
Although it is too early to say what caused the crash, engine trouble or weight shifting were unlikely to be the causes, said Greg Walden, managing editor for Asia at Flightglobal magazine in Singapore.
Other possible factors include pilot error, inclement weather or freak incidents such as bird strikes.
* Associated Press