Relatives of Taiwan crash victims question decision to let plane fly
Print Edition
TAIWAN officials yesterday defended a decision to give flight clearance to the plane that crashed in torrential rain, killing 48 people, as angry relatives blamed authorities for the worst air disaster in a decade.
Ten people survived when the TransAsia Airways flight, carrying 54 passengers and four crew, crashed in Magong in the Penghu island chain.
Two French medical students were among the dead, the foreign ministry in Paris said.
The ATR 72-500 was flying from Kaohsiung in southwest Taiwan to the islands off the west coast when it crashed into two houses near Magong airport, injuring five people on the ground, officials said.
Flight GE222 was attempting to land for a second time after aborting the first attempt during thunder and heavy rain brought by Typhoon Matmo.
“The airline should not have let the plane take off in such bad weather,” a man who gave his name as Hsu said outside a funeral home in Penghu, his eyes and nose red from crying.
Hsu’s 28-year-old son was killed in the crash.
“The weather was so terrible and Taiwan was still under the typhoon’s influence, (the plane) shouldn’t have taken off,” the daughter of pilot Lee Yi-liang, who also died, told the FTV cable news channel.
Taiwan officials defended the decision to allow the flight to go ahead. “Many people were questioning why the plane took off in typhoon weather ... according to my understanding the meteorology data showed that it met the aviation safety requirements,” transport chief Yeh Kuang-shih told reporters.
Two planes had landed safely at Magong airport shortly before the disaster, officials said.
Yesterday, the remains of the plane could be seen as more than 100 rescuers — including firefighters and soldiers — worked to remove bodies and debris from the scene.
A man surnamed Chen who lost six family members including his older brother in the crash was seen shouting at airline staff in Penghu. “What happened to the plane and what was the cause (of the crash)? At the very least the (airline) should have someone on the scene to comfort the relatives,” he said.
At a nearby funeral home, relatives sobbed as they waited to identify whether their loved ones had been killed.
Volunteers tried to comfort them as photographs of the victims were posted on walls to help with identification.
TV footage showed a female survivor identified as Hung Yu-ting being attended to by a nurse in hospital late on Wednesday.
Her father said she was the first to climb out of the wreckage of the plane and then borrowed a phone to call for help.
“We live close to the crash site and Yu-ting called her father to say the plane had crashed. We came to the scene to help. I carried a child whose legs were injured,” Hung’s uncle Hung Fu-tsai said.
Penghu deputy fire chief Hsu Wen-kuang said it took firefighters nearly an hour to put out the blaze after the plane burst into flames on impact.
Investigators are looking into the cause of the crash, including why the plane was cleared to fly in bad weather.
TransAsia said it planned to compensate each family of the deceased with NT$1 million (US$33,000) and offer NT$200,000 to each of the injured.
The last civilian plane crash in Taiwan was in 2002 when a China Airlines plane bound for Hong Kong crashed off Penghu islands into the Taiwan Strait, killing all 225 crew and passengers on board.
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