Translated material
This Boeing is on fire
Passengers and crew of the Taiwanese plane managed to escape
It is not for nothing that August has earned the reputation of a dangerous month for civil aviation. Yesterday, at the airport in Naha on the Japanese island of Okinawa, a Boeing 737-800 passenger plane flying in from Taipei, owned by the Taiwanese company China Airlines, burned down. All 157 passengers and eight crew members managed to escape the burning car.Eight minutes after flight CI-120 landed, airport personnel noticed a flame in the area of the left engine, which was immediately reported to the crew. On board the “fasten your seat belts” signal had already gone out, and people began to scramble to get things from the luggage racks. But then the pilot gave the command to leave the plane through the emergency exits.
A few seconds after the Boeing was completely evacuated, a strong explosion was heard in the lower part of the plane, and the plane was engulfed in flames. Despite the extreme situation, no one was hurt. Only a seven-year-old girl was hospitalized due to the consequences of the stress she suffered. The burning plane was extinguished for about an hour, the fuselage was completely burned out and fell apart into several parts.
"Everything was normal, including takeoff and landing, until the pilots reported there was a fire on board," a China Airlines spokesman said. Japanese police rule out terrorism. Japanese Transport Ministry spokesman Akihiko Tamura said the engine explosion occurred a minute after the plane taxied to the parking lot.
According to the airline, the burned Boeing was new and had been in operation since the summer of 2002, its maintenance was carried out on time. Taiwanese aviation authorities have temporarily banned flights of the B-737-800 - China Airlines has 11 aircraft of this type remaining, and its subsidiary Mandarin Airlines has three more. And another such plane belongs to the Taiwanese Air Force, and the island’s President Chen Shui-bian flies on it.
In the past decade, China Airlines has experienced two serious Airbus A300 crashes. Both planes crashed during landing: in 1994, 264 people died at the airport in the Japanese city of Nagoya, in 1998 in Taipei - 196 people. Those accidents were attributed to piloting errors, after which the airline took seriously the discipline and training of flight personnel, recruited, as a rule, after leaving the Air Force.
However, in May 2002, a new tragedy occurred. During a flight from Taipei to Hong Kong, an old Boeing 747 disintegrated in the air, killing 225 people. Experts cited metal fatigue as a possible cause of the disaster due to poor quality repairs in 1980, when the tail of the plane was damaged during an unsuccessful landing in Hong Kong.