A Day Later, Clues to Taiwan Crash Elusive

Pilot Kang Long-lin’s last landing, although in heavy fog, seemed to be on track until the last minute.

“All clear to land,” he told the control tower as he made his final approach.

One minute later, two bells sounded, possibly an alarm, as the Airbus A300 veered away from the runway toward a row of roadside houses.

“Tower,” Kang said before his voice faded out.

“CAL 676, confirm go-around,” said a puzzled air traffic controller, thinking Kang was going to abort the landing to try again.

And then silence.

That’s when one woman who lives near the airport heard two explosions as the jet ripped into the houses Monday night and she watched a fireball light up the sky. “I was shocked,” she said, “but in some way, living by the airport, I always thought it could happen.”

What she didn’t know at the time, though, was that a piece of flaming shrapnel from the crashing plane had hit and killed her 34-year-old brother while he was driving home in his car. “It’s horrible and unfair,” she said.

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Tuesday, hundreds of other relatives of the 203 victims joined a mournful pilgrimage to a crash-site morgue to identify their loved ones.

“This is the hardest thing a mother can ever do,” said a woman who identified herself only as Mrs. Chen after peering under sheets covering charred and fragmented remains, searching for her daughter. The identities of those who were unrecognizable were being determined through DNA samples.

Investigators are still looking for clues about what went wrong in the last minutes of flight CI676. In the heavy fog, with visibility of only about 600 feet, did the pilot mistake a highway running parallel to the runway for the landing strip? Was there a fault in the software that caused the plane to crash in almost the same way as the same model China Airlines Airbus did in Japan in 1994?

Airbus Industrie officials flew here from France on Tuesday to help the investigation. Taiwan’s aviation authorities have grounded all nine of China Airlines’ Airbus A300-600R twin-engine jets until they find some answers.

“The Airbus underwent a maintenance check in February. We found no problems. The plane was in good condition,” said China Airlines spokesman Hamilton Liu. “The chances of mechanical malfunction were very slim.”

But at a sprawling Buddhist funeral complex in Taipei, grieving relatives were also asking why it happened. From an unending stream of trucks and ambulances, workers unloaded victims’ remains--sometimes wrapped in sheets on stretchers, sometimes gathered simply in black plastic bags--and placed them into plywood boxes. The coffins were packed with dry ice, then covered in saffron shrouds and placed in a long row that stretched for hundreds of feet.

Candles and spirals of incense burned before each. Some had markers with names written in Chinese characters, but many of the markers were blank or bore just a number. Hundreds of mourners dressed in black sang a haunting chorus, blessing the souls of those laid out before them.

“It’s time to release the spirits,” said a robed nun, her head shaved. “The bodies will be buried on an auspicious day.”

But before they can all be released, they must be found. Airline officials said that at least four Americans were aboard, perhaps as many as six. The flight manifest listed Laurence G. Smith, Christopher Cory, Kenneth Cowan and Tom Hadel as passengers, but there was no confirmation that they were on the plane. On Tuesday, searchers had yet to find their remains.

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Among those killed were central bank Governor Sheu Yuan-dong, his wife and four top economic officials who had been attending a conference of central bankers on the Indonesian island of Bali. Sheu’s name tag from the conference, adorned with the Taiwanese flag, somehow survived and was plucked from the wreckage. Taiwan draped its central bank in white, the Chinese color for mourning, and the bankers observed a moment of silence before appointing Sheu’s acting replacement, Patrick Liang.

Liang, 59, has served as a deputy governor since 1995. Before that, he was vice chairman of the Economic Council of Planning and Development, the government’s economic think tank. Addressing concerns that losing so many key economic officials might lead to a sudden change in policy in the midst of the current regional economic crisis, Liang announced Tuesday that the government will stay its course.

But China Airlines faces major changes. Chairman Chiang Hung-yi has vowed to resign. Investors dumped the stock Tuesday until selling was automatically halted. News reports showed Fang Lin-shen, a China Airlines branch manager, in tears and on his knees, clutching the hand of a woman who had lost relatives and bowing in shame. The front page of every evening newspaper carried a half-page apology from the company.

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After the 1994 crash in Nagoya, Japan, which killed 264 people, the airline made a determined effort to improve its safety performance and win back passenger trust. The national carrier changed its logo from the Taiwanese flag to a pink plum blossom to cleanse its image, and it brought in German safety experts.

“China Airlines had been regaining momentum,” said Jonathan Ross, research director of the market research firm HG Asia in Taiwan. “ But after two crashes in close succession, it’s going to take a very long time to recover.”