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CNN Sunday Morning

China Airlines Plane Disappeared from Radar near Penghu Islands

Aired May 26, 2002 - 08:12   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: Now to Taiwan and the search for victims and clues from the China Airlines crash. The plane went down yesterday on a flight from Taipei to Hong Kong. It disappeared from radar near Penghu Islands. That's where CNN's Senior Asia Correspondent Mike Chinoy is this morning with another report. Hi, Mike.

MIKE CHINOY, CNN SENIOR ASIA CORRESPONDENT: Hello, Kyra. Well, I'm standing in front of an auditorium at a small Air Force base. The auditorium has been turned into a make shift morgue.

Bodies recovered from the crash site have been delivered here throughout the day. Inside relatives have been identifying the bodies and they have been placing coffins and put into vehicles like the one that's just driven up behind me to be transported back to the capital, Taipei.

Dozens of bodies have been recovered so far while a large number of those who died in the crash have not yet been found. There is no hope, officials say at this point, of any survivors.

Meanwhile, there is continuing mystery about what may have caused the crash. The pilot didn't issue a May Day or a distress call. The plane simply disappeared form the radar screens.

One puzzling thing is that many of the bodies that have been recovered, including some that I have been able to see here inside this morgue, appear to have been intact. And also we are told very little evidence of burns or the other trauma associated with a mid-air collision.

The Taiwan Aviation Authority said a couple of hours ago that it believed the aircraft simply disintegrated at 30,000 feet -- broke into four pieces and plunged into the sea.

The plane was an old one. It had been in service since 1979. China Airlines does have a poor safety record with three fatal crashes during the 1990s. But at this point, as officials begin to get the investigation moving into high gear, nobody has any clear idea of what may have happened. Kyra.

PHILLIPS: All right -- Mike Chinoy -- thank you so much. Well, American aviation experts are on their way to Taiwan to help the crash investigation now. And joining us now to talk more about the crash is the former editor of "Aviation Week" Jim McKenna. Jim, good to see you again.

JIM MCKENNA, FORMER EDITOR, "AVIATION WEEK": Good morning, Kyra.

PHILLIPS: Well, I was reading that you found similarities between this crash and the TWA 800 crash. Let's talk a little bit more about that.

MCKENNA: Similarities in the sense that the aircraft both disintegrated in mid-air. You could also draw similarities between this rash and the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

Investigators are going to want to figure out where the debris of this aircraft fell, how it broke up based on what the radar can tell them and take a close look at all of the debris that they can get a hold of very quickly to see if they can get a quick read on what might have caused the crash.

PHILLIPS: Jim, what causes a plane to disintegrate? What are some possibilities?

MCKENNA: Well, there are basically three possibilities. One is a mid-air collision and I'm sure the investigators already are reviewing what aircraft might have been in the vicinity.

The Taiwan Straits is a tense military area and they would want to find out whether the Chinese had any fighters up in the area or whether anyone else did.

The other is some kind of massive structural failure of the airplane but even those types of failures tend not to happen so quickly that the pilots can't radio some kind of report of an emergency.

And, of course, the third one would be a bomb onboard the airplane.

PHILLIPS: What do you think by looking at the evidence that's been collected thus far? Mike Chinoy is saying unfortunately he saw some of the bodies in the morgue -- there were no burns, which investigators are saying, "OK, it's probably not a collision."

So now there's the option of explosion possibility or technical malfunction.

MCKENNA: Well, that's exactly right. And that's what investigators will do. They'll take a quick look at the early evidence. Are the bodies burned? Is there any indication of -- that they were exposed to fire?

The fact that they found the debris from the airplane on land many miles from the crash site raises the specter of an explosion onboard because what happens with an explosion is that it blows up and it blows a hole in the airplane and what's ever in the vicinity of the hole gets sucked out early and the airplane may continue to fly on for a little bit before it disintegrates.

But you have to look at the unique circumstances of this crash. This airplane was a lot higher than TWA 800. TWA 800 fell in a fair -- what would be comparatively a fairly compact debris field.

The wreckage from this airplane seems to be spread over a much wider area. That could be explained by the fact that it was higher and there might have been higher winds in the vicinity.

Investigators are going to want to take a very close look at the evidence that they're finding on land to see if it's got any hints of explosive residue on it or pitting that would be present in something that was near an explosion. And that has to be high on their priority list.

PHILLIPS: And, Jim, Mike Chinoy yesterday and today continuing to talk about the airline's poor safety record. For someone that flies a lot -- I'm sure you do, too -- it's pretty scary to think that these planes can still take us from place to place even with a poor safety record. Why is this not monitored in a better way.

MCKENNA: Well, it is monitored in a fairly diligent way. What the China Airlines record illustrates I think is that airplane accidents of this type have become so rare that they're almost random. And it requires a great deal of diligence to figure out what could cause accidents and take steps to prevent them.

Now you say they've had a number of accident is in the last 10 years. If you go back to the early 1990s USAir in the United States had a series of five accidents in a short number of years.

Were they all related in some way other than the fact that it was one airline involved? It didn't appear to be so. There was no common link between the accidents -- they just seemed to be a random occurrence of several things going wrong to cause a crash.

That doesn't excuse anything, of course. And what safety professionals have to focus on is better ways to detect all of the things that might go wrong and figure out how you can put steps in place to prevent them.

PHILLIPS: Jim McKenna, former editor of "Aviation Week." Thanks again for your insight.

MCKENNA: Thank you.

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