23 dead and counting. 
Grim reading. But it makes me remember Captain Sullenberger’s landing on the Hudson.
Any speculation regarding what may have caused this?
Per the linked article ; “The last communication from one of the aircraft’s pilots was “Mayday Mayday engine flameout”, according to an air traffic control recording on liveatc.net.”
Not sure about that craft’s ability to climb much, if at all, w/ just one prop functioning. Hope those ‘in the know’ of craft and single-engine performance can give more detail.
Right now, Foxnews.com has a big photo of the jet careening over (thru?) an elevated freeway sideways. :eek:
ETA: There’s video footage in the article. The plane falls out of the sky sideways, clipping the freeway with its wing. It looks like a taxi got clipped as well.
Looks like it came kinda close to hitting those tallish buildings just prior to hitting taxi/bridge. Losing altitude fast, it appears. My amateur opinion is that pilot was trying to line-up with river (and trying avoid those buildings along way) and plane kept rolling to side at a too-great a rate, hence wing clip. Wild specualtion, to be sure, so I expect correction(s) from those who know this plane better (turboprop ATR 72-600)
It’s Taiwan’s 2nd TransAsia Airways crash in less than a year.
It did.
I try not to do any conjecture, as investigations usually bring up much better info than a WAG from someone not there. I’ll still throw out a few guesses that should be ignored as more info comes out.
Anyways…guessing it lost the left engine (hard to tell from vid, but looking at flight path) was at an airspeed below one engine min control speed (Vmca1) for their takeoff weight and they were too low to be able to dump fuel to lighten their weight.
At airspeeds less than Vmca1, with an engine out, you aren’t going fast enough to get air flow over the control surfaces to maintain control, and the engine that is operating is trying to turn the aircraft, and provide more lift (which is why I’m guessing the right wing was up and rising). You can stomp on the rudder and bank into the good engine, but if you are too slow, it won’t have much effect.
Awful story, though.
Article said the plane had been airborne about 3 minutes. Wouldn’t it be normal to always stay above Vmca1 after takeoff?
From the video it does appear that the pilot lost the left engine.
“Hey boss, you’ll never guess what happened…”
Looks like left engine failure to me, too. The video I’ve seen is a bit crude but the left prop seems to be going a lot slower than the right and the left bank is also consistent with such a scenario.
Nitpick: not all airplanes can “dump fuel”, in fact, I think the majority these days simply can’t do that.
In theory, but my multi-rated buddies tell me that in an actual engine failure on a twin you have very little time to react before things snowball out of control, and take off is arguably the worst time for an engine failure. You’re low, slow, and nose-high, this is not a good combination with power loss.
Yes, and you are also heavily loaded with fuel, as opposed to cruise or landing later on.
Early online USAToday headline.
So it was the bridge’s fault. Gotta wonder about the headline editors …
Yeah, it makes it sound like that was the sole/main reason for the crash; clipping the bridge.
I’m amazed anyone survived at all after watching that video.
Serious question: has there been any report on the taxi driver? It wasn’t clear to me from the video how seriously damaged the vehicle was.
Here’s a report:
The taxi looks less massively fucked than you might expect
It’s an air transport category twin. That means that provided the airline follows the rules regarding take off performance, they would have taken off at a weight that gives adequate climb performance to clear any obstacles in the take off path having suffered an engine failure at the most critical time which is, depending on the runway and the conditions, at best just as the aircraft rotates (it could also be on the ground prior to rotation.) So the performance should have been available.
I haven’t flown an ATR72 but I doubt they’d have any fuel dumping capability, that function is generally restricted to aircraft that have a large margin between the max take-off weight and max landing weight.
As far as being below Vmca, quite possible, but then the question is “how did they get that slow?”. V1 is the take-off decision speed, if you have an engine failure before V1 you have enough runway left to stop, if you have an engine failure at or after V1 you will have enough speed to safely fly. V1 must be faster than Vmcg and Vmca. In the process of rotating you will achieve V2 which is the minimum safe flying speed with an engine failed. So how did they get from a safe V2, back to being below Vmca?
That could account for them being out of control and slow. The only time I’ve crashed a simulator when I wasn’t just stuffing around was practicing an engine failure with no auto-feather. However, I’ve also successfully flown engine failures with no auto-feather as well, so it’s not a death sentence or anything, just a bit more challenging. I’ve also seen plenty of guys stuff up a bog standard engine failure after take-off so it can all be accounted for by poor handling without any prop malfunctions.
Apparently no injuries (warning, photo of no injuries.)
http://pbs.twimg.com/media/B8-Uj7MIMAEGkoD.jpg](TransAsia in the water? - Page 6 - PPRuNe Forums)
