At least 15 dead after plane crashes into Taiwan river - Video -

Feb. 4, 2015: a commercial plane lies in river after crashing in Taipei, Taiwan. (AP)

At least 15 people were killed Wednesday after a Taiwanese flight with 58 people on board clipped a bridge shortly after takeoff and crashed into a river in the island's capital of Taipei.

The death toll in the TransAsia Airways flight was expected to increase as rescue crews cleared the mostly sunken fuselage in the Keelung River a couple yards from the shore. Taiwan's civil aviation authority said 28 people, including those killed in the crash, had been pulled from the fuselage and 30 were unaccounted for.

The French-Italian-built ATR 72 prop aircraft was flying on its side with one wing scraping past Taiwan's busy National Freeway No. 1 just before it plunged into the river, local television images showed. The plane had taken off Taipei's Sungshan Airport en route to the outlying Taiwan-controlled Kinmen islands.

The plane's wing also hit a taxi, the driver of which was injured, on the freeway just before it crashed into the river, Taiwanese broadcaster TVBS reported.

Civil aviation officials said the flight took off at 10:53 a.m. local time (9:53 p.m. ET Tuesday)  and lost contact with controllers two minutes later. Thirty-one passengers were from China, Taiwan's tourism bureau said. Kinmen's airport is a common link between Taipei and China's Fujian province.

Wu Jun-hong, a Taipei Fire Department official who was coordinating the rescue, said the missing people were either still in the fuselage or had been pulled downriver.

"At the moment, things don't look too optimistic," Wu told reporters at the scene. "Those in the front of the plane are likely to have lost their lives."

Rescuers were pulling luggage from an open plane door to clear the fuselage, and Wu said they planned to build a pontoon bridge to facilitate those efforts.
Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense said it had sent 165 people and eight boats to the riverside rescue scene, joining fire department rescue crews.

A TransAsia media office declined comment on possible reasons for the crash, deferring to a news conference scheduled for later on Wednesday. Taiwan's Civil Aeronautics Administration also was also unable to discuss possible causes of the crash.

Another ATR 72 operated by the same Taipei-based airline crashed in the outlying Taiwan-controlled islands of Penghu last July 23, killing 48 at the end of a typhoon for reasons that are still under investigation.

The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

Source  : http://www.foxnews.com/world/2015/02/04/taiwan-plane-crash/