TAIPEI, Taiwan - A Taiwanese
flight carrying 58 people banked sharply onto its side, clipped a
highway bridge and careened into a shallow river Wednesday shortly after
taking off from Taipei, killing at least 26 people and leaving 24
missing, officials said. Fifteen people were rescued with injuries..jpg){kind=spacer}
More
than half of the passengers aboard TransAsia Airways Flight GE235 were
from China and the death toll was expected to rise as rescue crews
cleared the mostly submerged fuselage in the Keelung River. Teams in rubber rafts clustered around the wreckage, several 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 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 pilot may have turned sharply to follow the line of the river to avoid crashing into a high-rise residential area nearby, but Taiwan's aviation authority said it had no evidence of that.
- 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 pilot issued a mayday call shortly after takeoff, Taiwanese civil aviation authorities said.
Source: More on CBC, Agencies
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