TransAsia Flight 235 Crash: Engine Failure, Flight Crew Errors Reason For Crash In Taiwan, Report Says

A TransAsia Airways plane that crashed into a river in Taiwan in February last year went down because of engine failure and flight crew errors, a final investigation report found Thursday. The ATR 72-600 passenger jet plunged into the river shortly after takeoff from Taipei's Songshan airport, killing 43 people.

The Aviation Safety Council revealed last year that the pilot had shut down the only working engine, exclaiming, "Wow, pulled back wrong throttle,” seconds before the crash. The investigation found that one of the engines was malfunctioning shortly after the plane took off. The plane was on its way to the island of Kinmen off mainland China, before it went down into the Keelung River in northern Taiwan.

The accident, "was the result of many contributing factors, which culminated in a stall-induced loss of control,” the report said, according to Agence France-Presse.

"The flight crew did not perform the documented abnormal and emergency procedures to identify the failure and implement the required corrective actions,” it added.

This resulted to the two pilots' confusion over which engine was malfunctioning and eventually led to the shutdown of the wrong one. The twin-engine turbo-prop aircraft stalled and crashed shortly after its sole functioning engine was switched off.

After the crash, Taiwan’s Civil Aeronautics Administration ordered all 55 of TransAsia’s ATR pilots to undergo mandatory proficiency tests for handling an aircraft during engine failure. The Taiwanese government also ordered all local airlines to review their safety protocols in the event of a crash.