Posted on 06/21/2002 5:08:50 PM PDT by Asmodeus
An additional 14 bodies of victims of the May 25 China Airlines crash were recovered early yesterday, bringing the number retrieved to 144, according to officials from the Aviation Safety Council.
The search for the bodies of the remaining 81 dead will be given top priority, while the salvage of the aircraft wreckage will continue, sources said.
The wreckage is at the bottom of the sea in the Taiwan Strait and the remains of the victims will have to be recovered before the wreckage is salvaged, a spokesman for the council said, adding that the search for the wreckage may go on for a month or more.
The plane's two "black boxes" -- the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder -- were retrieved by the navy and taken to Taipei after having lain on the sea bed for more than 20 days.
Council officials said a study of the cause of the accident would begin in two days, after the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder are cleaned up.
The Hong Kong-bound Boeing 747-200 jet, with 225 people aboard, broke up in mid-air and plunged into the Taiwan Strait off Penghu about 30 minutes after take-off from the Chiang Kai-shek International Airport at Taoyuan.
The catastrophe was the latest in a string of CAL crashes since 1994 that have killed more than 700 people.
This type airplane has been in the air for over 20 years, without this type of incident.... and you would be wrong by several times over ...
Airplanes don"t "break up in the air" without a reason.This is true - they *don't* break up without reason. We have on record one clear-cut case where a forward cargo-bay door blew out (see UAL 811 accident) - and THAT was the cause and reason for that particular Boeing 747 'event'.
Initially it was thought to be a bomb - UNTIL the door was recovered - PROVING otherwise ...
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