Probe Focuses on Reports That Jet Hit Object

As a violent typhoon continued to lash this island, investigators of a deadly Singapore Airlines crash were trying to determine Wednesday whether the jumbo jet struck a mystery object on the runway seconds before shearing apart and bursting into flames.

Reports swirled around Taipei that the Boeing 747-400 bound for Los Angeles may have hit a wheel or a piece of heavy machinery that had been parked on a runway.

“We still can’t rule out any possibilities,” said Chou Kuang-tsan of Taiwan’s Aviation Safety Council, which is investigating the accident.

Crews recovered the jet’s “black boxes,” the data and voice recorders that should contain information about Flight 006’s final moments during takeoff Tuesday night. The workers, wrapped in raincoats, often had to link hands in a human chain to keep from being blown away by roaring winds.

The miserable weather delayed dozens of flights at Chiang Kai-shek International Airport here. It also hampered recovery of the last of the bodies from the wreckage, a grim task that was completed by morning’s end.

Authorities said at least 79 of the 159 passengers and 20 crew members were killed. The death toll, which includes 24 Taiwanese and 23 Americans, could climb because critically injured victims were clinging to life in area hospitals. One passenger was unaccounted for and presumed dead.

Some of the dead were so badly burned that DNA tests will be needed to identify the bodies, which lay in a makeshift morgue at the airport before being removed late Wednesday. Relatives collapsed in grief upon learning the fates of their loved ones.

“Daddy, Daddy, I don’t want this,” said a sobbing daughter after she and her sister peeled back a sheet that covered their father.

Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian joined mourners at the airport and offered his condolences, burning incense in a traditional tribute to the dead.

Relatives of the foreign victims are expected to reach Taipei, the Taiwanese capital, during the coming days. Many have complained of slow or wrong information put out by the airline, especially a hasty statement just after the accident that there were no known fatalities.

In an early morning news conference here in Taipei today, the deputy chairman and chief executive of Singapore Airlines, Cheong Choong Kong, apologized for the confusion and said the company should have waited longer before issuing a statement so as to avoid misleading anyone.

Investigators with the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board are due to arrive today to help their Taiwanese counterparts piece together what caused the Singaporean carrier’s first major disaster.

This morning, local investigators finished mapping the wreckage using aerial photographs and were continuing to interview the surviving flight crew. Four crew members died in the crash.

The main focus Wednesday was on reports that an object was in the path of the jet as it attempted to take off at 11:18 p.m. Tuesday.

The captain, a Malaysian named C.K. Foong, had reported spotting an object on the runway, a spokesman for Singapore Airlines said. Foong survived the crash.

Other survivors told of hearing an enormous noise as the plane--hurtling forward at about 180 mph--began nosing into the air, before bouncing back down onto the runway, breaking up and skidding to a halt.

“Right as we started to lift up the nose, there was a loud noise, a loud boom,” said James Paik, an engineer from Woodland Hills.

“I could see the flames right away,” Paik said. As fire engulfed the plane and smoke filled the cabin, he jumped out of an exit door with several fellow passengers, even though the safety chute had not deployed.

Paik, 29, was one of the lucky handful who walked away from the crash unscathed.

The source of the loud bang he and others heard has investigators guessing. Television footage showed a damaged excavator or crane near the broken-up airliner, which sat Wednesday as a charred husk on the runway. Some speculated that the ground equipment was the object the jet struck.

There was also a suggestion that the accelerating plane might have hit a wheel on the runway--an eerie echo of the July crash of a Concorde in Paris that experts suspect was caused when the supersonic jet ran over a piece of debris from another aircraft.

A wheel not belonging to the Singapore Airlines jet was reportedly found amid the wreckage. Initial rumors that the plane smacked into another jet were dismissed by Taiwanese officials. Billy K.C. Chang, deputy director of the Civil Aeronautics Administration, said there was no other aircraft on the runway.

The pieces of the wrecked plane came to rest on a second, unused runway parallel to the jet’s 2 1/4-mile-long runway. Both were out of commission Wednesday, leaving only one available for the backed-up line of planes trying to take off and land.

Despite the stormy conditions before Flight 006 crashed, aviation officials said they did not consider the weather hazardous enough to warrant closing the airport. Visibility, which Taiwanese officials said was about 1,800 feet Tuesday night, far exceeded the 600-foot minimum requirement, despite the approach of Typhoon Xangsane.

Singapore Airlines defended the decision of its pilot, a veteran with more than 11,000 hours of flying experience, to go ahead.

Foong “wouldn’t be allowed to take off if the weather conditions were very bad,” airline spokesman Rick Clements told reporters in Singapore. Indeed, passengers who boarded Flight 006 in Singapore credited the crew with a smooth approach into Taipei in rough conditions.

“The pilots performed an absolutely beautiful landing,” said John Harrison, a former Orange County resident who now lives and works in Indonesia. “I didn’t have any fear of getting on the plane” for the continued journey to Los Angeles.

Harrison and his wife, Mary, were planning to pick up their daughter in Irvine before going to Dallas for a wedding.

Instead, he found himself looking in horror at “a ball of flame” out the window, choking on smoke after the jetliner crashed and listening to the wrenching screams of his fellow passengers.

Clawing at the overhead oxygen masks, which were not activated, left him with scratches on his hand.

“It was horrible. It was a hot, putrid smoke--you couldn’t breathe,” said Harrison, 53. “You were gasping for air.”

Putting a pillow over Mary’s face, Harrison rushed to look for an escape. The yells of a flight attendant signaled that there was a way out in front, through the first-class cabin.

Harrison ran back to his seat and hustled his wife out--through the exit door, down a crumpled-up chute and eventually into the safety of the terminal, where the injured were laid out on chairs and the floor, covered with blankets to ward off shock. The Harrisons, relatively unhurt, were treated at a hospital for smoke inhalation.

They intend to continue with their plans to visit the U.S., perhaps leaving Taiwan today on another plane. Harrison, a frequent flier, said he continues to trust the safety of air travel.

Still, his wife will no doubt be nervous, he said, “just like I am.”