Photo: ARUNCHANDRA BOSE / AFP / Getty Images
China Airlines 611 was a regularly scheduled flight between Taipei and Hong Kong, operated on a Boeing 747-209B, which crashed into the Strait from Taiwan due to metal fatigue in the fuselage on 25 May 2022.
In this accident the 225 persons on board the plane, who were the 206 passengers and the 05 crew members.
The Boeing 747-200 operating on this route was the only aircraft of this type left in the fleet, as the others had been converted into freighters operating for the cargo division of China Airlines.
This would be his last commercial flight for China Airlines, as it had been sold to Orient Thai Airlines. The plane was supposed to return to Taipei after the flight to Hong Kong, but this unfortunately did not happen.
This plane had been delivered to China Airlines in 1980 and had registered 64.394 airframe hours, according to Aviation-safety.net.
This flight was relatively routine for China Airlines, as this route operated several times a day. In addition, weather conditions were reported to be good and relatively warm and therefore weather was not a safety issue.
Most passengers and all crew members (209 of 225) were Taiwanese, some passengers were Chinese and others Hong Kong residents.
114 passengers were tourists traveling to China on scheduled trips, and other prominent passengers on this service included a Taiwanese legislator and politician
Three minutes after takeoff, the aircraft broke up in mid-air and contact was lost. Nearly all wreckage was recovered, with flight recovery teams reporting most victims had extensive head wounds and injuries, but no reports of play dirty or fire.
Since this accident occurred in occupied airspace, other nearby aircraft were able to see the accident site and reported it to the authorities.
Both governments cooperated in this search, and this certainly sped up the process of identifying the victims. China Airlines also requested that the relatives of the victims send blood samples to laboratories to help with the identification of the victims.
To date, 175 of the 225 remains of the victims.
After the accident, an extensive investigation was launched. The final report cited inadequate maintenance as the main cause.
In February of 1980, 20 years before, the aircraft operated the CI flight 009 from Stockholm Arlanda Airport to Hong Kong International Airport when he was hit in the tail. Upon landing at Kai Tak airport, one of his two stops on this route, the tail of the plane had grazed the runway.
Instead of performing proper maintenance on the aircraft, the China Airlines engineering team simply installed a bender on the damaged part of the aircraft. This was not enough, according to the Boeing Structural Repair Manual. Constant use of the aircraft had enlarged the crack within the aircraft, ultimately leading to the aircraft breaking apart in mid-air two decades later.
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