China Airlines 747 broke apart in midair investigator says

The Washington Post

TAIPEI, Taiwan — The China Airlines Boeing 747-200 that crashed into the Taiwan Strait on Saturday carrying 225 people broke into four pieces while still high in the sky, the lead Taiwanese investigator said Sunday.

"There was an in-flight breakup above 30,000 feet. We are very positive about this," Kay Yong, managing director of Taiwan’s Aviation Safety Council, told reporters. He said military radar clearly showed the four pieces.

For a second day, rescue crews boats battled choppy seas northeast of the Penghu Islands, about 30 miles west of Taiwan. They had pulled in 83 bodies by nightfall, according to local television reports, but no survivors.

The crews had not retrieved the 22-year-old airplane’s "black boxes," the flight data and voice recorders that could provide critical clues as to what happened on Flight CI611.

On Sunday, the government ordered China Airlines, Taiwan’s biggest carrier, to ground the remaining four Boeing 747-200 planes in its fleet until inspections prove they are safe. The cargo planes are between 13 and 22 years old.

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board sent three staffers to help Taiwanese officials with the investigation.

With facts scarce, speculation of the tragedy’s cause continued, much of it involving the possibility of some sort of explosion.

The Boeing 747-200, bound for Hong Kong, left Taipei at 3:08 p.m., taking off into clear skies free of turbulence. Officials said they were struck by the absence of distress signals from the cockpit before the plane went down about 20 minutes into the flight, suggesting that whatever caused the crash, it happened in a flash.

There was no mention of any difficulties in a transcript of the pilots’ conversation with the air traffic control tower, released Sunday.

"At such a high altitude, 35,000 feet, to have something go wrong and the pilot didn’t even have time to send a distress signal — now that’s a big question mark," said James L.S. Chang, a China airlines vice president.

Taiwanese Defense Ministry officials sought to reject a theory that a stray missile or rocket had taken down the plane, asserting that no live ammunition drills had been held Saturday. Nor was it likely the plane suffered a center fuel tank explosion similar to the one that brought down TWA Flight 800 near New York in 1996.

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