The only crew member to survive Wednesday’s crash of TransAsia Airways Flight GE235 remains conscious and stable, but is being closely monitored in an intensive care unit, the Taipei Medical University Hospital said yesterday.
Flight attendant Huang Ching-ya (黃敬雅), 27, was rushed to the hospital at 12:20pm on Wednesday, about 90 minutes after the plane carrying 53 passengers and five crew members crashed into the Keelung River in Taipei’s Nangang District (南港), killing at least 31 and injuring 17.
“Huang was severely injured, sustaining pulmonary contusions, rib fractures, internal bleeding caused by kidney lacerations and multiple contused wounds. Fortunately, her conditions have stabilized after emergency treatment,” the hospital said in a statement yesterday.
Screen grab from Lee Ming-wei’s Facebook account
It was not the first time Huang has cheated death.
She told her parents that she would have been on board TransAsia Airways Flight GE222 that crashed in Penghu during poor weather on July 23 last year, if she had not changed shifts with another colleague at the last minute.
Flight GE222 crashed just outside Magong Airport after aborting a prior landing attempt because of severe weather conditions caused by Typhoon Matmo. Of the 58 passengers and crew on board, 48 were killed.
After visiting her in hospital, Huang’s parents quoted her as saying: “I thought I would have died.”
A 15-month-old passenger, surnamed Lin (林), who is suffering from pneumonia and a fever, and remained in intensive care at Taipei City Hospital’s Zhongxiao Branch as of press time yesterday, is also among the lucky few survivors.
Lin was traveling with his 34-year-old father, Lin Ming-wei (林明威), and mother, Chiang Yu-ying (江郁穎), both of whom were only mildly injured.
According to the boy’s uncle, Lin Ming-yi (林明毅), the family of three might not have escaped death if Lin Ming-wei had not requested to move his family toward the rear of the plane after boarding.
The decision allowed the trio to make it out of the plane without being blocked by obstacles, he said.
“My brother told me that after the crash he was held in his seat by his seat belt and was not thrown out of the plane. The minute he saw water flooding into the cabin, he immediately unfastened himself to save his wife and kid,” Lin Ming-yi told reporters.
Lin Ming-yi said that although by the time Lin Ming-wei found his son, he had already been submerged upside down in cold water for three minutes and his heart had stopped beating, he was able to resuscitate his boy by swiftly removing mud out of his mouth and administering cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
In addition to deceased 42-year-old pilot, Liao Chien-tsung (廖建宗), who was believed to have tried to steer the plane away from buildings to avoid further casualties, a 72-year-old passenger, named Huang Ching-shun (黃金順), has also received wide applause for reportedly helping four other passengers near him to unfasten their seat belts and escape.
In an interview with reporters yesterday, Hunag, who only sustained minor injuries, said he could tell how much Liao had tried to avoid crashing into buildings, before giving his best wishes to the people he tried to pull out of the plane.
Asked if he would avoid traveling by plane in future, Huang said: “Life and death are all predestined. I will still choose to travel by airplane, regardless of the airline.”
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching