At Least 19 Dead After TransAsia Plane Crashes in Taiwan River; Watch Shocking Footage
At least 19 people are now dead and another 24 missing after a TransAsia Airways flight en route to the Taiwan-controlled Kinmen islands crashed into a river in Taipei, Taiwan after clipping a wing on a bridge moments after takeoff Wednesday.
According to the BBC, the aircraft which was carrying some 58 people, is now broken up and its fuselage remained half-submerged in the Keelung River as rescue workers converge on the scene. Reuters reported 15 people survived.
A majority of the passengers aboard the TransAsia Airways Flight GE235 were from China according to USA Today and the death toll is expected to rise.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
"At the moment, things don't look too optimistic," Wu Jun-Hong, a Taipei Fire Department official told reporters at the scene. "Those in the front of the plane are likely to have lost their lives."
He said passengers still missing were either still in the wreckage or were pulled downriver.
Reports cited by the BBC said flight controllers lost contact with the plane at about 10: the final message from one of the pilots was "Mayday, mayday, engine flame out" suggesting that the plane had stalled due to engine failure.
Flight controllers lost contact with the plane at 10:55 local time. Video footage captured by travelers in cars on an elevated highway next to the river show the plane "banking sharply, hitting a taxi and clipping the bridge before crashing into the river," reported the BBC.
"I saw a taxi, probably just meters ahead of me, being hit by one wing of the plane," one eyewitness told local media. "The plane was huge and really close to me. I'm still trembling."
Fire official Wu Jun-Hong said rescue workers believe that most of the missing remained trapped in the head of the plane.
"We're asking the public works department for heavy cranes to be deployed in the hope that the body of the plane can be lifted up," he said.
The plane's flight data recorders known as black boxes, have been recovered and families of the victims were being notified.
In a televised news conference TransAsia chief Chen Xinde offered a "deep apology" and said his planes had been "under thorough scrutiny" since mid-2014. Just last July bad weather caused another TransAsia plane crash that killed 48 people. Both aircrafts were French-made ATR72-600 which Taiwan's Civil Aeronautics Administration described as its best plane according to USA Today.
"Both our planes and our flight safety system are following strict regulations, so we also want to know what caused the new plane model to crash, but I don't want to speculate," said Xinde.
