Report: pilot error behind Taiwan crash

TransAsia Airways Flight GE235 crashed minutes after take-off from Taipei's Songshan airport on February 4 with 53 passengers and five crew members on board. Only 15 people survived the incident.

Moments before the airplane plunged into the Keeling River, the pilot said in Chinese "Wow, pulled back wrong side throttle," a report released Thursday by Taiwan's Aviation Safety Council revealed.

Car dashcam images, which emerged after the accident, show the aircraft hitting an elevated road as it banked steeply away from buildings before nose-diving into the river.

The pilot's actions caused the remaining working engine to stall after the other one had lost power, investigators said.

A preliminary investigation shows the black boxes found the airplane's right engine had "flamed out" around two minutes after take-off, while the second, left engine, was stopped manually by the crew for unknown reasons.

One of the three pilots in the cockpit at the time of the crash pulled back the engine's throttle, the report stated, causing it to lose power.

With both engines shut off, the report added, the plane began a descent it was unable to recover from.

"Why the pilot did this, we don't know. That's the main task for our (final) analysis report," Thomas Wang, head of the aviation body said.

The draft of that report is expected to be made public in November, with the final report into the crash expected in April 2016.

The findings released Thursday were described as a "factual report" which provided more details about the incident, but did not attribute blame or draw final conclusions about the crash.

Both the pilot and the co-pilot died in the crash.

jlw/kms (AP, AFP)