Airline News
TransAsia president Peter Chen apologises to families of passengers killed in crash
February 10th 2015
Taiwan’s Civil Aeronautics Administration has ordered TransAsia Airways and Uni Air to ground their fleets of ATR72 aircraft to conduct engine inspections following last week’s crash of a TransAsia -600 variant soon after take-off from Taipei’s Songshan Airport. Read More » The accident, believed to have killed 43 out of 58 passengers and crew on board, was the second for Taiwan’s third-largest carrier in a year. Last July, a company ATR72-500 crashed while attempting to land at Penghu Island during a storm, killing 48 of the 58 passengers and crew on board.
The aircraft involved in last week’s crash was a nine-month old ATR72-600 aircraft delivered to TransAsia as part of an order of eight placed two years earlier. It was operating flight GE235 from Taipei to Kinmen Island. Shortly after take-off, the pilot declared "Mayday, Mayday, engine flameout". That was the last communication before the ATR lurched between buildings, clipped a taxi and an overpass before crashing upside down into a shallow river. The plane’s flight data (FDR) and cockpit voice recorders (CVR) were recovered almost immediately after the crash. At press time, preliminary findings from Taiwan’s Aviation Safety Council (ASC) indicated that a right engine flameout warning did indeed sound in the cockpit. However, this did not correspond with flight data recordings that suggested the engine did not actually flame out, but instead went into auto-feather mode, which means it was operating at a reduced level and not producing thrust. Strangely, according to the ASC report, the pilots then appeared to have set the left engine—which was not malfunctioning—“to fuel shutoff position resulting in left engine shutdown”, effectively depriving the Pratt & Whitney Canada PW127M-powered ATR of all thrust during its climb.
TransAsia Airways chief, Chen Xinde (Peter), bowed deeply at a televised news conference as he apologised to passengers and crew just hours after the crash. Mainland Chinese premier, Li Keqiang, said his government had offered Taiwan any necessary help following the crash that put renewed focus on Taiwan’s poor aviation safety record. The island nation’s carriers were involved in a total of six fatal accidents over the past twenty years, a high number given its relatively small size.
