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 The plane, a 70-seat ATR 72, crashed on Wednesday evening near the
runway while trying to land on the small island of Penghu, west of
Taiwan island, after a typhoon had passed earlier in the day.
The aircraft had 54 passengers and four crew on board. Two of the
dead were French, the French foreign ministry said, and 10 people
were injured and taken to hospital.
The leaders of rivals China and Taiwan both offered their
condolences over the deaths.
Taiwan's civil aviation authorities said the weather had been
suitable for flying.
"There were nine flights on the same route between 2 p.m. and 7 p.m.
yesterday. Only the TransAsia flight crashed," said Jean Shen,
director of the Civil Aeronautics Administration.
"The weather reports showed it was totally OK for landing," she
said, adding that authorities were not ruling anything out.
"We can not say for sure what went wrong at this point. The flight
safety committee has opened an investigation."
Both black boxes had been found and officials would begin examining
them later in the day, she said.
Alison Kao, a TransAsia spokeswoman, said the weather could have
been a factor but the airline was not jumping to any conclusions
before the investigation.
The aircraft took off from the southern Taiwan city of Kaohsiung,
heading for Makong airport in the Penghu islands, but it crashed
just short of the runway on its second attempt to land during a
thunder storm. The islands are also known as the Pescadores.. No one
on the ground was hurt.
Airline seats and life jackets were strewn around the crash site and
the roof of a nearby building was destroyed. Victims' families were
heading there, officials said.
POOR RECORD
Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou said in a statement all of the
island's people were grieving.
"Today is a very sad day in the history of Taiwan aviation," Ma
said.
China's president, Xi Jinping, who is on a Latin America tour, felt
"deeply grieved" after learning of the casualties, the mainland's
State Council Taiwan Affairs Office, said in a statement, according
to media.
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The mainland and Taiwan have been rivals for decades, with the
mainland regarding Taiwan as a renegade province, though commercial
relations have grown in recent years.
Typhoon Matmo hit Taiwan on Wednesday, bringing heavy rain and
strong wind. It later passed the island and headed to China and was
downgraded to a tropical storm.
Taiwan has had a poor record for aviation safety over the last two
decades, though it has improved recently after the government
tightened safety measures.
TransAsia had been involved in eight "incidents" since 2002,
including this latest one, according to data on the website of the
Aviation Safety Council. It had a fatal accident in 2002 when a
cargo plane carrying two pilots crashed into the sea.
TransAsia and bigger rivals, China Airlines and Eva Airways, have
been facing pressure from higher energy prices and increasingly
popular budget airlines.
TransAsia Airways is a Taiwan-based airline with a fleet of about 23
Airbus and ATR aircraft, operating chiefly short-haul flights on
domestic routes as well as to mainland China, Japan, Thailand and
Cambodia, among its Asian destinations.
Shares of TransAsia Airways ended down 5.5 percent after opening 7
percent lower. The main index ended up 0.3 percent.
(Additional reporting by Michael Gold in Taipei and Pichi Chuang in
Penghu; Editing by Robert Birsel)
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