Searchers struggling with choppy seas on Sunday found 35 bodies
from a China Airlines plane which crashed into the Taiwan Strait,
but no reasons as to why it suddenly lost contact and fell from the
sky.
Coast guards fished the bodies of 12 men, 21 women and two children
from the rising swells, as well as large pieces of wreckage from
waters near Penghu island.
Penghu rescue leaders saw little chance that anyone had survived
from the Boeing 747-200 with 225 people on board.
Empty yellow body bags were stacked in piles as the first victims
to be discovered were placed in a small sports stadium in a local
air force base, near the small port.
The Taiwan carrier's flight CI 611 disappeared abruptly from radars
on Saturday soon after taking off from Taipei for Hong Kong,
leaving mystery in its wake and dealing a new blow to the safety
record of China Airlines, which has now suffered four air crashes
since 1994.
Distressed relatives were already gathering in Penghu. Brian Yen's
cousin was on the plane en route to the Chinese mainland via Hong
Kong to visit his girlfriend. "She was pretty upset. She was
screaming," Yen said.
The search continued for the crashed plane's two critical black
boxes, the robust, on-board monitoring systems which often tell
investigators what happened in air disasters.
Speculation of a mid-air explosion grew after farmers in Taiwan's
western coastal county of Changhua, about 50 miles northeast of the
crash site, found debris from the plane in their fields.
A
doctor said that bodies retrieved so far had suffered broken bones,
but no burns.
Aviation authorities said the pilot had not issued any distress
signals before the aircraft disappeared in clear weather about 20
minutes into the 90-minute journey.
The plane, almost 23 years old and with almost 65,000 flying hours,
had already been sold to Orient Thai, a Thai charter carrier, and
was due to be delivered on June 20.
Taiwan's Aviation Safety Council declined to speculate on the cause
of the crash, and said it had contacted the US National
Transportation Safety Board, the Boeing Company, and engine maker
Pratt and Whitney.
A
Boeing team of investigators was on its way to Taiwan from the
United States.
Peter Lok Kung-nam, former director general of Hong Kong's Civil
Aviation Department told Reuters: "It is fairly certain the
aircraft suddenly broke apart."
"There was absolutely no forewarning, no distress call, not even a
secondary radar distress signal, the whole thing must have happened
very quickly," he said.
Lok suggested three possible causes: an explosion, sudden
de-pressurization which could have knocked the crew out, or the
more remote possibility of a collision in the air with another
unknown object.
(China
Daily May 26, 2002)