TransAsia plane crash
February 4, 2015
Taipei - At least 15 people have been confirmed dead in a fatal TransAsia plane crash after it landed in a river outside Taiwan’s capital Taipei, local media and officials said.
The death toll in the TransAsia Airways flight was expected to rise as rescue crews cleared the mostly sunken fuselage in the Keelung River a couple dozen meters from the shore. Teams of rescuers in rubber rafts clustered around the wreckage.
The ATR 72 prop-jet aircraft was flying on its side, with one wing scraping past Taiwan's National Freeway No 1 just seconds before it plunged into the river, local television images showed. It was the airline's second French-Italian-built ATR 72 to crash in the past year.
Wednesday's flight had taken off from Taipei's downtown Sungshan Airport en route to the outlying Taiwan-controlled Kinmen islands.
Civil aviation officials said the flight took off at 10:53 and lost contact with controllers two minutes later. Thirty-one passengers were from China, Taiwan's tourism bureau said. Kinmen's airport is a common link between Taipei and China's Fujian province.
Taiwan's civil aviation authority said 15 people were killed out of 28 pulled from the fuselage and that 30 people were still missing.
Wu Jun-hong, a Taipei Fire Department official who was coordinating the rescue, said the missing people were still in the fuselage or had been pulled downriver, he said.
"At the moment, things don't look too optimistic," Wu told reporters at the scene. "Those in the front of the plane are likely to have lost their lives."
Rescuers were pulling luggage from an open plane door to clear the fuselage, and Wu said they planned to build a pontoon bridge to facilitate those efforts.
The plane's wing also hit a taxi, the driver of which was injured, on the freeway just before it crashed into the river, Taiwanese broadcaster TVBS reported.
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