A TransAsia Airways turboprop plane crashed on its second attempt at landing during a thunderstorm on an island off Taiwan on Wednesday, killing 47 people and setting buildings on fire, officials said. The plane, a 70-seat ATR 72, crashed near the runway on the island of Penghu, west of the mainland, with 54 passengers and four crew on board, they said. No one was killed or hurt in the buildings. Eleven injured people on the plane were taken to hospital, the government said. The aircraft took off from Taiwan’s southern city of Kaohsiung, headed for the island of Makong, but crash-landed in Huxi township of Penghu County, the main island of the chain also known as the Pescadores. “It was thunderstorm conditions during the crash,” said Hsi Wen-guang, a spokesman for the Penghu County Government Fire Bureau. “From the crash site we sent 11 people to hospital with injuries. A few empty apartment buildings adjacent to the runway caught fire, but no one was inside at the time and the fire was extinguished.” About 100 firefighters were sent to the scene, as well as 152 military personnel and 255 police, he added. According to an official at the Civil Aeronautics Administration, air traffic control reported that the inclement weather at the time of the crash did not exceed international regulations for landing. Visibility was 1,600 metres and the cloud cover was as low as 600 metres, added the official, who declined to be identified. Television networks aired footage of TransAsia’s president, Chooi Yee-choong, bowing in apology. “We express our deepest apologies to everyone for this unfortunate event.” Typhoon Matmo hit Taiwan on Wednesday, bringing heavy rain and strong winds, shutting financial markets and schools. It passed the island and headed into China, downgraded from typhoon to tropical storm. TransAsia Airways is a Taiwan-based airline with a fleet of around 23 Airbus and ATR aircraft, operating chiefly short-haul flights on domestic routes as well as to mainland China, Japan, Thailand and Cambodia, among its Asian destinations. credits: the globe and mail more asian airplane tragedy -cry2
Those idiots should be jailed to give permission to fly any aircrafts during stormy weather...-madsign1
... and over a war zone with unpredictable sophisticated fire power and range as that from US, Russia, China, India , Israel, France , UK, and to rely on an excuse " I didn't know that they would/could use weapons that I did not think the enemy had!" or "I didn't know they would use such a weapon!"....just to earn a few more bucks or save some aviation fuel. These guys have daily operational meetings, it is always a debate between risk assessment or say yes to business as usual (profits or earnings per share). I believe the economic model, put in its simplest maths, is this, operationally a company would add up the revenue loss for x incidents that they would loose revenue by saying no using risk assessment and then cut the threshold of risk at a level. Then a company would calculate the amount of payouts should the risks materialise. Then they would model at verious level of risk assessment and then then optimise profit. Should there be unacceptable risks, that risk damage could be repaired or spinned by a PR company or director as it is relatively economical to use an effective PR agent than to loose millions. At the end of the day the insurance premium is a means by which unacceptable risk is distributed to many insured so death can be relatively "cheap" in an economic model. Since all risks ultimately end up as financial numbers in business. The sympathy could be manufactured by PR. In business may decision makers decide on NOT using safe = 100% guaranteed safety, they work on 99.9% with managed risk whose risk if materialised has predictable outcome such as the amount of insurance premium increase after a claim.
