News Digest

At least 23 dead, dozens missing as TransAsia plane crashes into Taipei river

A Taiwanese flight carrying 58 people turned on its side in midair, clipped an elevated roadway and careened into a shallow river Wednesday shortly after taking off from Taipei, killing at least 23 people and leaving dozens missing, officials and media reports said. The death toll was expected to rise as rescue crews cleared the mostly sunken fuselage in the Keelung River a couple dozen meters from the shore. Teams of rescuers in rubber rafts clustered around the wreckage. The ATR-72-600 prop-jet aircraft was flying on its side, with one wing scraping past Taiwan’s busy National Freeway No. 1 just seconds before it plunged into the river, local television images showed. It had taken off from Taipei’s downtown Sungshan Airport en route to the outlying Taiwan-controlled Kinmen islands.

At the moment, things don’t look too optimistic. Those in the front of the plane are likely to have lost their lives.

Wu Jun-hong, a Taipei Fire Department official

Civil aviation officials said the flight took off at 10:53 a.m. and lost contact with controllers two minutes later. Thirty-one passengers were from China, Taiwan’s tourism bureau said. Kinmen’s airport is a common link between Taipei and China’s Fujian province. Taiwan’s Central News Agency said 12 people were killed. Wu Jun-hong, a Taipei Fire Department official who was coordinating the rescue, said the victims were among 27 people pulled from the plane. The remaining people were unaccounted for, and were either were still in the fuselage or had been pulled downriver, he said. Rescuers were pulling luggage from an open plane door to clear the fuselage, and Wu said they planned to build a pontoon bridge to facilitate those efforts. Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense said it had sent 165 people and eight boats to the riverside rescue scene, joining fire department rescue crews.