Posted on 07/23/2014 6:35:41 AM PDT by csvset
Taipei, July 23 (CNA) As many as 45 people are feared dead and nine people are injured after a passenger plane operated by TransAsia Airways crashed on the outlying island county of Penghu Wednesday.
The local fire department said that the 45 had no life signs after the twin-engine turboprop ATR 72 crashed just outside Magong airport around 7 p.m. The flight, coded GE 222, took off at 5 p.m. in Kaohsiung and was scheduled to land at Magong 35 minutes later.
The reason the crash happened over an hour later was not immediately clear. (By Elizabeth Hsu)
I think the “over an hour later” is in relation to the scheduled landing time: takeoff at 5pm, scheduled to land at 5:35pm, crashes at 7pm more than an hour after their scheduled landing time.
And if there was a typhoon in the area, as it seems there was, I can fully understand taking the extra time in hopes of getting a break in the weather to make the landing. That must have been a horrible flight, even without the crash. Flying in a Yahtzee dice cup for 2 damn hours. Gah.
Yowser!
That looks like a “puddle jumper” regional commuter plane, so I don’t know what kind of instruments they were using, if any, for that ride to the island. But they sure flew into something bad. (I haven’t flown a plane since the 70s, and that was a s/e Cessna 172 Skyhawk.)
I’ve done that on a motorcycle. Just following the faint red lights ahead since it was even more dangerous to pull over and wait.
But 2 meter visibility at 2000' doesn't necessarily preclude breaking out below the clouds at 300' AGL four miles ahead. PIREPs (Pilot Reports) are oh, so welcome at such times, as well as a recent RVR (runway visual range) report.
HF
C’mon up to the Northeast and add blinding, accumulating, unplowed snow to the mix. I do many trips between Maine and Mass. and inevitably it happens once a winter or so.
The highways become black thanks to lights being removed many years ago and you can't slow down also due to the fear of losing traction on a low grade hill. Add to that 18 wheelers still moving like it's a summer day and it's just a blast.
The thing about fog is, many times it comes without warning. I know sometimes blizzards do happen unexpectedly, but usually there is some warning.
Common problem on the 5 in the early winter in the central valley of Cal.
That’s got to be a typo or a screwup. 2 meters visibility is effectively “zero/zero” weather (zero ceiling zero visibility), and the only types of aircraft allowed to land in that weather are those with highly sophisticated Category III auto-land systems—AND, the landing would only be permitted at an airport with special high-precision ILS systems that the computers onboard the airplane could use to make an automatic landing. In short, both the airplane and the particular runway have to be certified for Category III landings.
I’m not 100% sure but I don’t think a regional turboprop like an ATR-72 would be certified for Cat III autoland. I could be wrong, though, but I’d be surprised.
}:-)4
I had to re-listen to it 2x, but he did say meters. Maybe he meant kilometers. Now you’re getting into terminology/numbers which are way above my pitiful pay grade, but I hear what you’re saying. Heh.
RIP.
According to wiki, TransAsia has already lost 2 aircraft of this type: 1 in 1995, and 1 in 2002. both appear to have been cargo variants and in both situations all crew were lost.
CC
Other airlines has lost plenty of these too.
I was dumbfounded when I saw the report come over the tv just shortly after the crash. I am about 50 miles from Kaohsiung. We were still at the tail end of the typhoon. For the past few hours leading up to the crash and also afterwards, the weather was light rain, however, without warning you would get torrential downpours and wind gusts of about 60 mph. I couldn’t believe they let that type of plane fly during this weather.
Yeah, i also saw the list of incidents attributed to this type. It wa a fairly long list.
CC
I suspect that initiation of the 35min flight was the primary fatal decision since the storm covered a wide area, and diversion to another airport with better conditions was probably not available.
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