Taiwan's top air safety administrator yesterday described a China Airlines flight -- which lost its senior pilot due to a heart attack and was landed by the young co-pilot -- as a "serious incident."
He said post-landing procedures for the flight on Monday would be closely scrutinized to see if regulations were followed.
The subsequent cause of the pilot's death will not be known until an autopsy and an investigation into as-yet unspecified medication found in the pilot's aviation bag is carried out, the head of the Cabinet-level Aviation Safety Council (ASC) said yesterday.
Captain Gueorguiev, a Bulgarian veteran pilot, suffered a heart attack and fell into a coma just after taking off on a CAL flight to Vietnam.
The incident, on Monday morning, forced co-pilot Lin Hsin (林欣), 27, to abort the flight and make an immediate return to Taipei.
Although none of the 259 passengers and 14 crew members on board were injured, the 45-year old Gueorguiev was rushed unconscious to a local hospital and pronounced dead at 10:25am.
Lin said yesterday that any co-pilot would have been capable of taking control of the plane and making a quick return to Taipei -- without triggering any aviation safety mishaps.
"What I worried about at the time was my partner, whose condition looked quite serious," Lin said.
The mishap, according to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), was graded as "a serious incident," said Kay Yong, (
"The incapacitation of a crew member is a serious incident according to ICAO definitions," Yong said.
Although ASC investigators and prosecutors from Taoyuan public prosecutors' office continued interviewing crew members yesterday to understand the case, the cause of Gueorguiev's death will remain inconclusive until an autopsy is carried out, said Yong.
"Although his relatives have given verbal consent to the proposed autopsy over the phone, the work won't start until written consent from his relatives comes through," Yong said.
CAL spokesman Scott Shih (石炳煌) said CAL were arranging for Gueorguiev's relatives to come to Taipei "as soon as possible."
The ASC will also work with the Department of Health to find out what the unknown drugs found in the veteran pilot's aviation bag were, Yong said.
Another focus for the ASC investigation is on what Yong called the "less-than-satisfactory coordination" carried out after the plane landed back in Taipei on Monday morning.
"We consider it necessary to further investigate the overall coordination after the plane landed," he added.
When asked to detail what he considered the pitfalls in the related coordination work, Yong said he would brief reporters on this aspect at a press conference scheduled to be held today.
In related news, the Civil Aeronautics Administration (CAA) decided yesterday to suspend the operation of Daily Air, including its regular and chartered flights, for two months, due to a series of mishaps since 1998.
Following the airline's plane crashes in 1998 and 1999 that killed six people, a Daily Air helicopter was snagged by a wire stretching across the valley in Taichung County on Monday, injuring a total of eight people. Daily Air was also required to complete a plan in six months to improve the airline's financial situation as well as its aviation safety record, said CAA officials.
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