TransAsia Turboprop ATR-72 Crashes Into Taiwan River, Killing 23

 

By Shanshan Dong, Julia Zhou and Alastair Jamieson

BEIJING - Rescuers scrambled to pull survivors from the wreckage of a plane that banked to the left, clipped an elevated highway and plunged into a river shortly after takeoff in Taiwan Wednesday.

A young child was among the passengers ferried to safety from the partially submerged TransAsia twin-engine ATR-72, which had just taken off from the capital, Taipei.

Taiwan's Civil Aeronautics Agency said 23 of the 58 passengers and crew on board were confirmed dead and 15 rescued, leaving 20 others unaccounted for. 

Dramatic dashcam video showed the plane quickly losing altitude and turning almost 90 degrees to the left as it crossed the highway, clipping a taxi and the road surface with its wing before crashing into the Keelung River. Teams of rescuers in rubber rafts clustered around the wreckage of the aircraft, according to television pictures from scene. Some survivors swam to safety. 

"The water is not clean, rescuers cannot see clearly underwater," a member of the fire rescue team told reporters at the scene. "The most important thing now is to drag the plane to the bank. They will dive into the water."

"I've never seen anything like this. This is unprecedented," a volunteer rescuer surnamed Chen said, according to Reuters.

Flight GE235 had just taken off from Songshan Airport, according to Ding-zhao Yi, an official with the New Taipei City Fire Department. The state-run Central News Agency said the flight was bound for Kinmen Airport in an outlying county just off the southeastern coast of China, and took off at 11:35 a.m Wednesday local time (10.35 p.m. Tuesday ET).

Zhiming Ling, bureau chief of the aviation agency, said the plane was less than a year old and had completed a round of safety checks on Jan. 26.

The plane's black boxes - the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder - were recovered, the agency said.

An unverified recording posted online appeared to show the pilot telling air traffic controllers that he was declaring an emergency because of an engine failure. "Mayday, mayday, engine flameout," the pilot purportedly tells controllers.

It was the second crash in little more than six months involving the same type of aircraft belonging to TransAsia. Another of the airline's ATR-72s crashed on a Taiwanese island, killing 48 people, in July.

The CEO of TransAsia, Xinde Chen, apologized for accident and thanked authorities for their help.

He said 31 of the passengers were Chinese nationals from mainland China, including three children. The remaining passengers were Taiwanese nationals, including one child, he said.

NBC News' Shamar Walters and Reuters contributed to this report.