Taiwan pilot shut off engine before crash

Taiwan pilot shut off engine before crash
By Hannah Edensor


The pilot of a passenger plane that crashed in Taiwan, killing 43 people, shut down the aircraft’s only working engine, exclaiming: “Wow, pulled back wrong throttle,” seconds before the disaster.

TransAsia Airways Flight GE235 clipped a bridge and plunged into a river shortly after take-off from Taipei’s Songshan airport in February with 53 passengers and five crew on board. Only 15 people survived.

Disturbing cockpit transcripts revealed by Taiwan’s Aviation Safety Council showed pilots trying to deal with an engine that had lost power, but then reducing the thrust of the other, functioning engine.

Thursday’s report showed the plane climbed to 365 metres before a warning alarm sounded.

That alarm showed the plane’s second engine as having undergone “flameout at take off”.

The failed engine was referred to as Engine Two by the warning signal, but the pilot at the controls said: “I will pull back Engine One throttle.”

Chaos then ensued with both engines failing as the pilots tried to restart them in the few seconds before the crash.

The last words from the black box recordings were the monitoring pilot shouting: “Impact, impact, brace for impact.”

Dramatic car dashboard camera images at the time showed the plane hitting an elevated road as it banked steeply away from buildings before crashing into the Keelung River.

“As the pilot pulled back the wrong throttle, for some time both engines were powerless,” Thomas Wang, head of the aviation council, said.

Wang also confirmed previous reports that the pilot had failed a simulator test for engine failure on take-off last year, but passed a later retake.

Investigators refused to name the pilot at the controls but reports at the time of the crash identified him as Liao Chien-tsung.

The draft of that report is due out in November and the final report is expected in April 2016.

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