=20 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- This article was sent to you by someone who found it on SF Gate. The original article can be found on SFGate.com here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=3D/chronicle/archive/2002/05= /27/MN217000.DTL ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Monday, May 27, 2002 (SF Chronicle) Chinese jet broke up well before impact Peter S. Goodman, Washington Post Taipei, Taiwan -- The China Airlines jet that crashed into the Taiwan Strait on Saturday carrying 225 people broke into four pieces while still high in the sky, a sudden and calamitous event of still-unknown cause, the lead Taiwanese investigator said Sunday. "There was an in-flight breakup above 30,000 feet. We are very positive about this," Kay Yong, managing director of Taiwan's Aviation Safety Council, told reporters. He said military radar showed the four pieces. For a second day, rescue crews on boats battled choppy seas northeast of the Penghu Islands, about 30 miles west of Taiwan, breathing in jet-oil fumes and navigating swells reaching 10 feet. They had pulled in 83 bodies by nightfall, according to local television reports, but no survivors. The crews had not retrieved the airplane's "black boxes," the flight data and voice recorders that could provide critical clues as to what happened. With facts scarce, speculation on the tragedy's cause continued, much of it involving the possibility of some sort of explosion. The Boeing 747-200, bound for Hong Kong, left Taipei at 3:08 p.m., taking off into clear skies free of turbulence. Officials said they were struck by the absence of distress signals from the cockpit before the plane went down about 20 minutes into the flight, suggesting that whatever caused the crash, it happened in a flash. That impression was reinforced Sunday with the release of a transcript of the pilots' conversation with the air traffic control tower: There was no mention of any difficulties. "At such a high altitude, 35,000 feet, to have something go wrong and the pilot didn't even have time to send a distress signal -- now that's a big question mark," said James L.S. Chang, a China Airlines vice president. Suspicions of an explosion surfaced shortly after the crash when farmers on the west coast of Taiwan, 50 miles from the crash site, found debris from the plane scattered in their rice fields. A fisherman told a Taiwanese cable television news station that he had heard what sounded like an explosion. Taiwanese Defense Ministry officials sought to reject a theory that a stray missile or rocket had downed the plane, asserting that no live ammunition drills had been held Saturday. Nor was it likely the plane suffered a center fuel tank explosion similar to the one that brought down TWA Flight 800 near New York in 1996. The China Airlines plane was at an altitude where there would not have been enough oxygen to support such an explosion, and the tank would likely have been far too cold for that to have happened. China Airlines has one of the worst reputations for air safety of any major carrier in the world. The fatal accident was the carrier's fourth since 1994. The crash provided a rare instance of cooperation between Taiwan and China, which have been divided by the waters in which the plane landed for half a century, ever since China's former Nationalist government fled to the island to escape victorious Communist forces. The plane crashed just inside Taiwan's half of the strait, but currents were pulling bodies across to China's side, said Taiwanese Prime Minister Yu Shyi-kun. "There will be no political considerations in our rescue effort," Yu sai= d. In other circumstances, talk of a breach into Chinese waters by Taiwan's ships would threaten war. China considers Taiwan to be part of its territory and has repeatedly threatened to attack and capture the self-governing island.=20 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2002 SF Chronicle