At least 23 people have been killed and another 15 rescued, including four children, from the wreckage of a passenger plane after it clipped a freeway overpass and crashed into a river in Taiwan on Wednesday.
Fire department officials have confirmed that 14 of the fatalities died at the scene while the other nine died as a result of their injuries before they reached a hospital,The Strait Times reports.
The other 20 passengers remain unaccounted for and are believed to be still trapped inside the TransAsia Airways GE235 plane as the rescue operation on the Keeling River in the capital city of Taipei continues.
However The Strait Times reported that eye witnesses of the disaster claimed they saw people being thrown out of the plane upon impact.
Civil aviation officials said the flight took off at 10:53am, en route to the island of Kinmen, and lost contact with controllers two minutes later. The cause of the crash remains unknown.
In what was believed to be the final communication from the cockpit, aired by local television news, the plane's crew could be heard shouting 'Mayday! Mayday! Engine flameout!'.
A 'flameout' is when the flame in a plane's engine is extinguished, resulting in a loss of power or engine failure.
Watch a motorist film the the plane descend before it crashed, so sad!
sad.
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