World

Taiwan's Unfriendly Skies

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

August 22, 1999 / 11:05 AM EDT / CBS

Pressing questions about the state of aviation safety in Taiwan were underscored Tuesday by the second accident in three days. Two days after a plane crash landed in a typhoon, 28 people were injured when a domestic passenger jet caught fire as it landed.

As the UNI Airlines MD-90 touched down, there was a loud Â"strange noiseÂ" from the front of the cabin and thick black smoke poured from one of the overhead luggage compartments, said the airline's vice chairman, Si Chung-ching.

Eyewitnesses reported a ball of fire on the runway after the jet landed at the Hualien Airport, 110 miles southeast of Taipei, following a 25-minute flight from the capital.

Television footage showed black smoke belching from the plane's fuselage as firefighters struggled to douse the flames.

Si said the passengers were quickly evacuated, and it took 30 minutes to put out the fire. A man and a woman suffered serious injuries, with burns covering more than 60 percent of their bodies, he said.

The plane carried 90 passengers and six crew members.

The accident came just two days after the crash of a China Airlines MD-11 in a tropical storm at Hong Kong's international airport, which killed two people.

On Tuesday, a Taiwanese aviation regulator said the pilot in Sunday's accident was given faulty information from his own co-pilot about wind speeds.

But it was not immediately clear how the error occurred aboard the Taiwanese jetliner, which flipped upside down and burst into flames after its right wing clipped the runway Sunday night. More than 200 were injured in the crash of Flight CI642 from Bangkok.

Hong Kong investigators have located the Â"black boxÂ" cockpit recorder in the wreckage, but were still trying to recover it Tuesday, said Alex Au, deputy director of Hong Kong's Civil Aviation Department. Heavy rains had hindered the recovery effort Monday.

Au said he had no immediate comment on Chang's remarks about the wind-speed error.

Meanwhile, U.S. safety investigators arrived in Hong Kong early Tuesday to assist in the crash investigation. Investigators are considering a sudden change in wind speed or faulty communications in the cockpit among the potential causes for SundayÂ's crash.

Boeing said the MD-11 was delivered by McDonnell Douglas to Taiwan's China Airlines in October 1992. The aircraft had compiled a service record of approximately 30,700 flight hours over the course of 5,800 flights.

Boeing will also dispatch investigators to the scene of the crash to "provide technical data and expertise on the airplane involved to help learn the causes of this tragedy," a statement from the company said.