Revisit the infamous crash of TransAsia Flight 235 in Taiwan, captured on video, and follow the race to find the cause.
TransAsia Airways Flight 235 was a TransAsia Airways domestic flight from Taipei to Kinmen (Quemoy), Taiwan. On 4 February 2015, the aircraft serving the flight, a 10-month-old ATR 72-600, crashed into the Keelung River shortly after takeoff from Taipei Songshan Airport, 5.4 km (3.4 mi; 2.9 nmi) to the east of Songshan in Taiwan. The aircraft had 53 passengers and five crew on board; 15 of them survived.
Two minutes after takeoff, the pilots reported an engine flameout. Flight 235 climbed to a maximum height of 1,510 ft (460 m), then descended. The other engine, still working, was shut down mistakenly. Immediately before crashing into the river, it banked sharply left and clipped a taxi travelling west on the Huandong Viaduct (causing two more injuries), then the viaduct itself, with its left wing.
Flight 235 was the second fatal accident involving a TransAsia Airways ATR aircraft within seven months; Flight 222 had crashed on 23 July 2014, killing 48 of the 58 onboard..
Flight
Flight 235 departed Taipei Songshan Airport at 10:52 Taiwan time (02:52 UTC), for its destination of Kinmen Airport, with 53 passengers and five crew members on board.Shortly after take-off, a fault in the autofeather unit of the number-2 engine caused the automatic take-off power control system to autofeather that engine. The flight crew misdiagnosed the problem, and shut down the still-functioning number-1 engine.146 The aircraft reached an altitude of 1,630 ft (500 m) and then began descending until it crashed.The last pilot communication to air traffic control was: "Mayday, mayday, engine flameout." At 10:55,the aircraft crashed into the Keelung River, on the border of Nangang District of Taipei and Xizhi District of New Taipei.
The crash was recorded by dashcams in several cars travelling west along the elevated Huandong Viaduct next to the river.The aircraft, flying level, first cleared an apartment building. Then it rolled sharply, at nearly a 90° bank angle, left wing down. As the aircraft flew low over the elevated viaduct, its left wingtip struck the front of a 2015 Volkswagen Caddy taxi travelling west on the viaduct, and the outboard section of the wing was torn off when it struck the concrete guardrail at the edge of the viaduct.The aircraft continued its roll and struck the water upside down,breaking into two main pieces. The collision with the taxi and the viaduct was captured in footage from a dashcam in a car travelling a short distance behind the taxi, and debris from the plane's wing and pieces of the viaduct's guardrail were thrown across the road surface. Two people in the taxi suffered minor injuries.
At the time of the accident, no adverse weather phenomena were observed. At 11:00, the cloud base at Songshan was about 1,500 ft (460 m), the visibility was unlimited, and a light breeze was blowing from the east at 10 knots (19 km/h; 12 mph). The temperature was 16 °C (61 °F)
Aircraft
The aircraft involved in the accident was an ATR 72-600 twin-turboprop, registration B-22816, MSN 1141. It first flew on 28 March 2014, and was delivered to TransAsia Airways on 15 April 2014. The left Pratt & Whitney Canada PW127M engine was replaced in August 2014.
Investigation
The Taiwanese Aviation Safety Council (ASC) led the investigation into the accident. The French Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses pour la Sécurité de l'Aviation Civile represented the country of manufacture, and the Transportation Safety Board of Canada represented the country of engine manufacture. Other parties to the investigation included the Taiwanese Civil Aeronautics Administration, the operator (TransAsia), the aircraft (ATR) and engine (Pratt & Whitney Canada) manufacturers, and Transport Canada.The cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder were recovered on the evening of 4 February, and the data were analysed. According to the executive director of the ASC, Thomas Wang, the aircraft's right engine triggered an alarm just 37 seconds after takeoff. Whereas the crew reported a flameout, according to Wang, data showed the right engine had in fact been moved to idle power. Soon the right engine failed to produce enough thrust for its rotating propeller, lapsing into auto-feathering.[34] A restart was attempted, but the aircraft crashed 72 seconds later.
On 6 February, investigators revealed that the left engine, which does not appear to have had suffered a malfunction, had been manually shut off,[35] while cautioning that the investigation was "too early to say if human error was a factor". Investigators released the following preliminary sequence of events. All times are local (UTC+8).
10:51:13 – Crew receives take-off clearance
10:52:34 – Tower asks the crew to contact Taipei Departure
10:52:38 – Right engine failure alert; master warning sounds for 3s
10:53:04 – Crew reduces power to the left engine
10:53:12–18 – Stall warning sounds
10:53:24 – Crew cuts power to the left engine
10:53:34 – Crew declares emergency: "Mayday, mayday, engine flameout"
10:54:09 – Crew calls for restarting the left engine multiple times
10:54:20 – The left engine is restarted
10:54:34 – Master warning sounds again
10:54:35 – An unidentified sound is heard
10:54:36 – Recordings end
The ASC issued an interim report on 2 July. Without assigning responsibility for the crash, the report confirmed that a still-functional engine number one was incorrectly shut down by the pilot following the failure of engine number two. The report also stated that the pilot in command had failed to pass a simulator test in May 2014, partly due to his insufficient knowledge about the procedure for handling an engine flameout during takeoff. He retook the test the following month, however, and successfully passed. The ASC released a draft report in November 2015 and published the final version in July 2016.
The final report found that, following the uncommanded autofeather of engine number 2, the pilot flying the aircraft reduced power and subsequently shut down the operative engine number 1. The flight crew failed to perform the failure identification procedure and did not comply with standard operating procedures. As a result, the pilot flying the aircraft became confused regarding the identification and nature of the propulsion-system malfunction. The autofeathering was caused by compromised soldering joints in the autofeather unit. During the initial stages of the take-off roll, the flight crew did not reject the take-off when the automatic take-off power control system ARM pushbutton did not light, and TransAsia did not have a clear requirement to do so. The loss of engine power during the initial climb and inappropriate flight control inputs by the pilot flying generated stall warnings and activation of the stick pusher to which the crew did not respond in a timely and effective manner. The loss of power from both engines was not detected and corrected by the crew in time and the aircraft stalled during the attempted restart at an altitude from which they could not recover. Ineffective flight crew coordination, communication, and threat and error management compromised the safety of the flight. The crew failed to obtain relevant data from each other regarding the status of both engines. The pilot flying did not appropriately respond to input from the pilot monitoring.
During the investigation, TransAsia Airways disclosed confidential information from the draft report to Next magazine, which published a story in its issue of 11 May 2016. This was an attempt to influence the investigation into the accident. TransAsia Airways were fined NT$3,000,000
Canadian TV series Mayday (also known as Air Disasters and Air Emergency in the US and Air Crash Investigation in the UK and the rest of the world) covered Flight 235 in episode seven of series 17, called "Caught on Tape", which was first broadcast on 19 September 2017 in Australia.
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