TransAsia Airways Flight 235

Flight 235 departed Taipei Songshan Airport at Taiwan time , for its destination of Kinmen Airport, with 53 passengers and five crew members on board. Shortly after take-off, a fault in the autofeather unit of the number-2 engine caused the automatic take-off power control system to autofeather that engine. The last pilot communication to air traffic control was: "Mayday, mayday, engine flameout." At 10:55, breaking into two main pieces. The collision with the taxi and the viaduct was captured in footage from a dashcam in a car travelling a short distance behind the taxi, and debris from the plane's wing and pieces of the viaduct's guardrail were thrown across the road surface. Two people in the taxi suffered minor injuries. At the time of the accident, no adverse weather phenomena were observed. At , the cloud base at Songshan was about , the visibility was unrestricted, and a light breeze was blowing from the east at . The temperature was . ==Aircraft==

The aircraft involved in the accident was an ATR 72-600 twin-turboprop, registration B-22816, MSN 1141. It first flew on 2014, and was delivered to TransAsia Airways on 2014. The left Pratt & Whitney Canada PW127M engine was replaced in August 2014. ==Passengers and crew==

The passenger manifest was composed of 49 adults and 4 children. Thirty-one passengers were mainland Chinese; many were visitors from Xiamen on a six-day tour of Taiwan. The remaining 22 passengers were Taiwanese. Also, an observer, Hung Ping-chung, 63, was seated in the cockpit jump seat, who had a total of 16,121 flight hours, 5,314 of them on the ATR 72. Two flight attendants (including Huang Ching-ya) were working as cabin crew. All crew members were Taiwanese citizens; the co-pilot was a dual New Zealand–Taiwanese citizen. ==Rescue and recovery==

Taipei police and fire departments received dozens of calls from eyewitnesses almost immediately after the crash. The Taipei Fire Department, military, and volunteer rescue workers arrived at the crash scene within minutes, Of the 58 people on board the flight, only 15 survived. One of the two flight attendants, Huang Ching-ya, survived. ==Press reports==

Some media outlets reported anonymous claims that the pilot had complained of "engine abnormalities" and asked for an inspection of the aircraft prior to take-off, but that the request had been refused. This assertion has been denied by both TransAsia Airways and the Civil Aeronautics Administration, the former of whom has released the maintenance records for both powerplants, both propellers, and the airframe. ==Reactions==

TransAsia Airways Following the accident, TransAsia Airways changed its website and social media branding to greyscale images, in mourning for the presumed deaths of the passengers. On , TransAsia retired the flight number GE235, changing it to GE2353. Taiwan The spokesperson of the Office of the President of the Republic of China reported that President Ma Ying-jeou was very concerned about the accident and had given orders to the Executive Yuan and related authorities to provide maximum assistance with the rescue. Immediately after the accident, the president of the Executive Yuan, Mao Chi-kuo, contacted the Ministry of Transportation and Civil Aeronautics Administration to instigate an investigation into the crash, and the minister of national defense to prepare the military for the rescue. The final report on the investigation carried out by Taiwan Transportation Safety Board was released on 30 June 2016. China Over half of the passengers on board the aircraft were Chinese. On 2015, Xi Jinping, the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, released a statement, ordering that accurate information on the aircraft be obtained as quickly as possible, and that "assistance [be provided] in treating the injured". On the same day, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang instructed relevant departments to obtain accurate information from Taipei as quickly as possible. ==Investigation==

The Taiwanese Aviation Safety Council (ASC) led the investigation into the accident. The French Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA) represented the country of manufacture, and the Transportation Safety Board of Canada represented the country of engine manufacture. Other parties to the investigation included the Taiwanese Civil Aeronautics Administration, the operator (TransAsia), the aircraft (ATR) and engine (Pratt & Whitney Canada) manufacturers, and Transport Canada. Whereas the crew reported a flameout, according to Wang, data showed the right engine had in fact been moved to idle power. while cautioning that the investigation was "too early to say if human error was a factor". Investigators released the following preliminary sequence of events: Interim report The ASC issued an interim report on . Without assigning responsibility for the crash, the report confirmed that a still-functional engine number one was incorrectly shut down by the pilot following the failure of engine number two (right engine). The report also stated that the pilot in command had failed to pass a simulator test in May 2014, partly because he demonstrated insufficient knowledge about the procedure for handling an engine flameout during takeoff. He retook the test the following month, however, and successfully passed. The ASC released a draft report in November 2015 and published the final version in July 2016. During the investigation, TransAsia Airways disclosed confidential information from the draft report to Next magazine, which published a story in its issue of 11 May 2016. This was an attempt to influence the investigation into the accident. TransAsia Airways were fined NT$3,000,000 (US$92,000). ==Aftermath==

The Civil Aeronautics Administration announced it would subject all TransAsia Airways ATR pilots to supplementary proficiency tests between 7 and , The Taiwanese CAA announced that it is focusing its attention on TransAsia's training and operations and the country's labor ministry fined the airline for breaches of the labor code over excessive working hours. On , TransAsia offered NT$14.9 million (about US$475,000) in compensation to the family of each of the dead. This amount includes emergency relief and funeral allowance, totaling NT$1.4M (US$44,300), already paid to each family. Not all of the families have accepted the offer. The taxi that was struck by the plane has been transported and preserved in the Taxi Museum in Su'ao, Yilan County. Before this accident, TransAsia Airways Flight 222, which involved another ATR 72-500, crashed during approach as a result of pilot error. These two accidents significantly weakened the airline's image. The airline ceased operations and shut down indefinitely on 22 November 2016. ==In popular culture==

The Canadian TV series Mayday (also known as Air Disasters and Air Emergency in the US and Air Crash Investigation in the UK and the rest of the world) covered Flight 235 in episode seven of season 17, called "Caught on Tape", which was first broadcast on 19 September 2017 in Australia. == See also ==