August 20th, 2007China Airlines 737 Catches Fire in Okinawa
There seems to be a resurgence of plane incidents lately. A few days back there was that incident in Turkey, and now a China Air 737 suffers an explosion shortly after landing in Okinawa, Japan. All 155 passengers made it safely off the plane, however, there are some stewarts unaccounted for. Hopefully this was just a mechanical failure.
If there is a resurgence in terrorism on planes, my trip to Korea might just need to be postponed or cancelled.
I’ll post more on this as the story unfolds….
Update (12:30 PM Japanese Standard Time)
The fire is out and officials are reporting that the fire was caused by the left jet engine overheating. This does not appear to be a terrorist attack at the moment. A full investigation has been started by China Airlines, but I doubt we’ll hear anything further about this thanks to China’s “No Bad News” policy.
Update (August 23, 2007)
Here’s a 10 minute video with the coverage recorded by news agencies shortly after the fire began.
And here is one recorded by someone inside the airport, while waiting for their own flight.
Officials from the US and Taiwan have already arrived on the Japanese island of Okinawa to begin the investigation of the wreckage. They believe the incident started first with a fuel leak from one of the engines.
The investigation team, which includes some people from Boeing, plan on taking apart the right wing engine support pylon to see if a fuel pipe inside may have ruptured.
On Tuesday, the CEO of China Air flew to Japan to apologize to passengers, and I feel sorry for the mess that he’ll have to clean up. Many of the people on board seem to be more upset with the fact that their luggage was completely burned up than the fact they had to escape a burning plane. This doesn’t surprise me, as it’s certainly an opportune time to “cash in” for people who are into that thing.
That said, the accident is a blow to the Taiwanese flag carrier, which has worked pretty hard in recent years to improve its image. The airline suffered several crashes during the 1990’s, and in 2002 one of their planes crashed into the sea near Penghu with 225 passengers on board.
As I write this, word is coming in that a China Airlines plane has been forced to make an emergency landing at Kansai International while en route to Nagoya. Initial reports had said the plane ran out of fuel, but a spokesperson for the carrier said the pilot had been told the runway at Nagoya had been closed. While I find this second option to be quite odd, I’ll wait to see Kansai’s response before passing judgement.
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This is very worrisome and so is the fact that the TV news channels stopped showing it. It was burning at the front right as passengers were exiting the rear right and then it exploded at the rear left. I saw it only once on a news channel. Yahoo had a film of it as the plane burned collapsed and exploded on it’s homepage ABC News link and it vanished pretty quickly also.
Hmm, that’s quite odd. It’s still on the news here in Japan. I’ll see if I can find a video or two and post it. Oddly enough, some people managed to get their video cameras from the overhead compartment before fleeing the plane. I’m not sure whether this means the camera is more important than their lives, but it made from some pretty dramatic footage.