Taiwanese investigators have completed a preliminary draft report on the crash of a Singapore Airlines jet that took off on the wrong runway and slammed into construction equipment, killing 83 people, an official said yesterday.
The report -- which does not include probable causes of the accident last October at Taipei's airport -- was sent to US, Australian and Singaporean agencies that helped with the probe, said Kay Yong (
The assisting foreign agencies have been asked to comment on the draft report before Nov. 1, Yong said. A final report that describes the causes of the crash, contributing factors and recommendations should be finished by January or February next year, Yong said.
"What we have in the preliminary report is 90 percent of the final report," said Yong, managing director of Taiwan's Aviation Safety Council.
Yong said Taiwanese investigators have preliminary explanations of what caused the accident, but they don't want to publish their conclusions until they have evaluated the comments of other investigators.
The investigator refused to discuss what Taiwanese officials believe caused the crash of Flight SQ006, and the preliminary draft report was not released to the public.
The pilots of the Los Angeles-bound jumbo jet tried to take off last Oct. 31 in a heavy rainstorm caused by an approaching typhoon. The airstrip they used was closed and blocked by construction debris and equipment, including two large mechanical shovels.
The Boeing 747-400 slammed into the equipment and burst into flames.
Last February, Taiwanese investigators released a report that said that the pilots told the tower five times they believed they were on the correct runway. The pilots were also warned in a preflight briefing report that the runway was closed, the report said.
However, the report also painted a troubling picture of Taipei's airport. Lights were broken and markers were missing for the runway that should have been used by the Singapore Airlines jet.
Singapore Airlines has long been considered one of the world's safest airlines.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR? Jaw Shaw-kong said that Cheng Li-wen had pushed for more drastic cuts and attacked him, just for the outcome to be nearly identical to his bill The legislature yesterday passed a supplementary budget bill to fund the purchase of separate packages of US military equipment, with the combined amount of spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.8 billion). The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their legislative majority to pass the bill, which runs until 2033 and has two main funding provisions. One was for NT$300 billion of arms sales already approved by the US for Taiwan on Dec. 17 last year, the other was for NT$480 billion for another arms package expected to be announced by Washington. The bill, which fell short of the NT$1.25
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS