31 were confirmed dead after a Taiwanese flight with 58 people on board crashed after it took off on its side, on Wednesday morning.
While 31 people have been confirmed dead so far, more causalities are expected to be discovered as wreckage crews and rescue workers clear the fuselage, which at the current moment is mostly sunken in the Keelung River.
Rescue parties went out in teams in rubber rafts near the wreckage, the plane, TransAsia Airways Flight GE235, landed several dozen yards from the shore.
Officials reported that 15 people survived the crash with injuries, but 18 passengers are still unaccounted for; 31 of those passengers were from China, according to Taiwan’s tourism bureau.
A trending video of the crash has been captured and posted online by a driver who was traveling along Taiwan’s busy National Freeway No. 1. The video shows the plane crashing right into the bridge just ahead in the distance from where the driver’s vehicle was on the bridge. Before it crashed into the river the left wing crashed into a taxi car, injuring the driver and its passenger.
Officials are still unaware as to why the plane went down, but Taiwanese broadcasters have been constantly playing the last broadcast of the plane, where you can hear the pilot say “mayday” three times in a row.
While the cause of the accident is still unknown, TransAsia director Peter Chen stated that weather conditions were fine for the plane to depart, and went on to say, “Actually, this aircraft in the accident was the newest model. It hadn’t been used for even a year.”
Asian managing editor at Flightglobal magazine in Singapore, Greg Waldron stated that, “While it’s too early to say what caused the crash, engine trouble or weight shifting were unlikely to be causes,” he then continued by stating, “It’s too early now to speculate on whether it was an issue with the aircraft or crew.”
Waldron does believe that the easy access to the crash site should be a huge factor in determining went wrong on Wednesday morning.
Photo by: AP
