BEIJING
Taiwanese aviation safety officials announced Thursday that the pilot of a TransAsia flight that crashed into a river in Taipei had throttled down the wrong engine in an accident that claimed 43 lives.
The Aviation Safety Council cited data from the black boxes of the ATR72-600 plane as showing that engine No. 1 had been switched off after the pilots discovered that the other engine had suffered a flameout.
"Wow, pulled back the wrong side throttle [engine No. 1]," the captain of Flight GE235 could be heard saying on the cockpit voice recorder, Taiwan’s Central News Agency reported.
The plane crashed Feb. 4 after clipping an elevated section of road and a taxi’s roof before plunging into the Keelung river, killing 43 of the 58 people on board.
Data gathered from the black boxes during a preliminary investigation had indicated that the plane flew for just three minutes and 23 seconds after receiving clearance from Songshan Airport en route to the Kinmen islands, off China’s southeast coast.
The Council’s managing director, Thomas Wang, said Thursday that the pilots had throttled engine No.1 after detecting a malfunction that powered off engine No. 2. after the plane reached an altitude of around 1,200 feet (around 365 meters).
He also said that flight instructors from TransAsia had told the Council’s investigators that Flight GE235 should not have been permitted to take off, the agency reported.
After the data was disclosed, TransAsia President Fred Wu told a press conference that after the accident, the airline had requested that aviation experts and the plane’s manufacturers conduct safety checks on its fleet and train its personnel.
He underlined that all 61 of its captains operating the planes had passed the appropriate Civil Aeronautics Administration inspections.
Wu, however, declined to comment on whether the flight should have been allowed to take off after the malfunction was detected during taxiing.
