TransAsia Flight GE222: Taiwan Airways plane crash kills at least 40

A Taiwanese passenger plane has crashed after a failed emergency landing in Taiwan, killing more than 40 people.

10 survivors, 48 dead in Taiwan’s worst air disaster in 12 years

The domestic flight crashed near Magong airport on the outlying Penghu island with a total of 54 passengers and four crew on board.

Flight Route of GE222

The flight GE222 aborted its initial landing but then still crashed. It was a very stressful scene with around 190 military personnel joining rescuers in the search for survivors.

‘Plane in flames’

11 people were sent to hospital with injuries while a few empty apartment buildings adjacent to the runway caught fire. Luckily no-one was inside at the time and the fire was extinguished.

Flight GE222 was an ATR 72 turboprop aircraft which departed from the southern municipality of Kaohsiung at 17:43 however lost contact with controllers at 19:06.

Local media reported that the plane was found at Penghu island’s Xixi village in flames.

TransAsia Airways’ The General Manager of TransAsia Airways; Hsu Yi-Tsung has tearfully apologised for the accident and promised to spare no effort in the rescue operation and to transport relatives of passengers on the flight to Magong on Thursday morning.

The day before a tropical storm call Typhoon Matmo had battered Taiwan relentlessly.In spite of this, an official at the Civil Aeronautics Administration told Reuters that bad weather at the time of the crash did not exceed international regulations for landing.

The Typhoon caused a lot of flights to be cancelled however this embargo was lifted only 15 minutes before Flight GE222 took off.

In May 2002 a China Airlines jet broke apart shortly after take-off from Taipei killing all 225 people onboard. Investigators put this down to the aircraft having had fatigue cracks and corrosion near where it was repaired after an earlier accident.

Rough weather

Officials have assured it was safe for the flight to take off despite over 200 flights being cancelled during the day due to the weather.

The mother of one of the victims, her 27 year old son, screamed at TransAsia Chairman Vincent Lin when he arrived to pay respects at the funeral hall Friday.

The plane’s black box has been recovered and sent to the main island of Taiwan for analysis. One of the flight recorders was damaged in the fire after the plane crashed and for this reason it wasn’t immediately clear when results of the investigation would be made public.

Algerian Flight #AH5017 has crashed with no survivors

This is truly beyond the joke. Another week and another plane goes missing with strong suggestions that it has crashed with no survivors. Two French fighter jets where dispatched to look for the missing flight AH5017.

The flight was bound for Algeria and carrying 116 passengers. 6 of which were crew and the rest passengers. The news has shocked the world as yet another aviation disaster hits the headlines after such a short space of time since the MH17 flight was blown out the sky as it flew over Eastern Ukraine.

The aircraft took off from Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso at 0117 hrs, local time, and was supposed to land in Algiers at 0510 hrs, local time, but never reached its destination.

The flight had been asked to change route because of a storm, half an hour after its departure. Satellite imagery from Eumetsat clearly shows a large storm in the flight’s path at the time of the apparent diversion.

Algerian Flight #AH5017 has crashed with no survivors

Weather Map of Flight AH5017

It is thought that the aircraft re-routed over a remote and uninhabited mountainous region of Mali.

Location where communication of Flight AH5017 was lost

The BBC’s Alex Duval-Smith in Mali says there was “very bad weather” in the area, as well as “armed groups”

Algerian Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal reportedly told Algerian radio: “The plane disappeared at Gao (in Mali), 500km (300 miles) from the Algerian border.”

The area leading up to the Algerian border is vast and sparsely populated.

Flight path of AH5017

The plane is operated by Air Algerie and chartered from Swiftair who said the aircraft was an MD83.

According to reports, the aircraft was not far from the Algerian border when the captain was requested to make a detour because of poor visibility and to prevent the risk of collision with another aircraft on the Algiers-Bamako route.

It was after this change in the flight path that contact was lost.

Flight AH 5017 flies the Ouagadougou-Algiers route four times a week. It has also been reported that the plane was quite old according to aviation experts.

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