Taipei: A plane had been crashed while emergency landing outside an airport on a small Taiwanese island late Wednesday. The transport minister had confirmed that 47 people were trapped and feared dead.
Taiwanese Transport Minister Yeh Kuang-shih was quoted as saying that 11 other people were injured when the plane crashed and caught fire while making a second landing attempt.
Yeh also said that the flight was operated by Taiwan’s TransAsia Airways and had carried 58 passengers and crew members.
According to reports, Flight GE222, a twin-engine turboprop ATR-72 aircraft, was heading from the southern port city of Kaohsiung to the island of Penghu in the Taiwan Strait. It crashed outside the airport in Xixi village.
Penghu is a lightly populated island that averages about two flights a day from Taipei.
Reports also said that visibility as the plane approached was 1,600 meters (one mile), which met standards for landing, and two flights had landed before GE222, one at 5:34 p.m. and the other at 6:57 p.m.
Taiwan was battered by Typhoon Matmo early Tuesday morning, and the Central Weather Bureau warned of heavy rain through the evening, even though the center of the storm was in mainland China.
Bureau Report
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