261 Die in Crash of Taiwanese Jetliner in Japan

A Taiwanese jetliner crashed and burned Tuesday night while trying to land at an airport in central Japan, killing 261 people in Japan’s second-worst air disaster.

The pilot of the China Airlines Airbus A300-600R, with 271 people on board, tried at the last moment to abandon his landing approach and go around for another attempt, witnesses and officials said.

The plane, en route to Nagoya from Taipei, crashed several hundred yards from the runway, broke into pieces and burst into flames.

Ten badly injured survivors rescued from the flaming wreckage were being treated in hospitals this morning. The rest of the passengers and crew were confirmed dead.

“The plane was coming in on a glide path but suddenly pulled up in a steep ascent,” a local resident told NHK television. “Then I saw the engines catch fire. It crashed and there was an explosion.”

Other witnesses said they heard three explosions after the crash. One witness quoted on television said the plane did not have its landing gear down. Visibility was good and there was little wind.

Firefighters needed 40 minutes to extinguish the blaze. For several hours after that, Japanese television showed rescue workers picking through the wreckage. One large section of the white-red-and-blue fuselage remained intact, but the rest of the airplane was shattered into pieces spread over a large area.

Hundreds of ambulances raced to the scene. About 3,000 police, firefighters and troops, equipped with arc lights and metal cutters, joined the rescue effort. Some operated cranes, lifting pieces of the charred jetliner in the grim search for bodies. Tents were erected at the site to serve as temporary morgues, while additional bodies were simply covered with orange blankets and set in rows near the wreckage. Tearful relatives and friends looked on helplessly from the distant airport terminal.

Takahide Miyagi, a Nagoya assistant fire chief, told reporters that when he arrived at the crash site, “it looked so bad that I thought everyone must have died.”

“But then I heard a woman calling in pain for help, and I called for a stretcher and we rescued her,” Miyagi said.

About 158 of the passengers on Flight 140 were Japanese, many returning from package tours; 63 were from Taiwan. No further breakdown of the passenger list by nationality was available. The plane had 257 passengers and a crew of 14.

Shortly after receiving permission to land at 8:14 p.m., pilot Wang Lo-chi contacted air-traffic control to say he would abandon the landing approach and try again. His last transmission, a Transport Ministry official said, was “Going around.” The plane crashed 30 seconds later without any further indication of any trouble, officials said.

A badly injured survivor quoted by Fuji TV said passengers had received no warning of any danger.

The plane would have plowed into a residential area had it gone another 200 yards. It stopped near hangars of an air force base at the airport, and the airmen’s quick response helped save some lives.

Chang Tai-shih, manager of the airline’s Japan branch, said the right wing of the plane touched the ground just before it burst into flames. He apologized for the accident and pledged that the carrier will do all it can for the families of the victims and survivors.

Chang said the ill-fated jetliner had no record of trouble. The plane was 13 minutes late taking off from Taipei for its 1,180-mile flight to Nagoya, 170 miles west of Tokyo.

Airbus Industrie said the company will send investigators to the site. This is the first crash of an A300-600R, a twin-engine wide-body jet. The plane was delivered to China Airlines in 1991.

Japan’s worst air disaster was Aug. 12, 1985, when a Japan Airlines Boeing 747 crashed into a mountain, killing 520 people.

A passenger on an earlier China Airlines flight from Nagoya to Taipei on Tuesday was quoted on Taiwan television as saying his airplane had engine trouble. But a spokeswoman for Airbus Industrie in Paris said this was a different jetliner from the one that crashed.

“An A300-600 had an engine problem departing from Nagoya that same morning. It was not the aircraft that had the accident,” she said. That problem involved the aircraft’s starter engine, but after some difficulty the engine started normally, she said.