Sounds like another "F" for safety for this Taiwanese airline.

A China Airlines air bus carrying 254 passengers and crew members narrowly avoided catastrophe early Friday when pilots took off in the wrong direction and on a taxiway instead of a runway at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport.

In its takeoff just before 3 a.m., the plane came so close to running out of taxiway that its landing gear clipped a snow berm at the pavement's end before it gained altitude over Cook Inlet and flew on to Taipei, according to federal investigators.

"I think it's safe to say disaster was averted by inches," said Jim LaBelle, Alaska's top official with the National Transportation Safety Board, the federal agency that mounted an investigation Friday.

Controllers instructed the China Airlines pilots to take off from a north-south runway but instead they used an east-west taxiway. Investigators and a China Airlines official say they still don't know why.

The rest of the story is at http://www.adn.com/front/story/755166p-805215c.html

"air bus"? Whoops. That can't be right. ...

Good to see no one was hurt, though.

Yikes! I thought this only happened in M$ Flight Simulator.

At least the aircraft took off before the taxiway ended.

- Pat

Takeoffs are easy with the MS Flight Simulator, or the Sierra Pro-Pilot. It's the landings that are giving me probs.

bj-21.

I am Taiwanese, and I always take EVA Airline. China Airline has had something like 5 crashes in the last 10 years.

btw, China Airline has one of the worst safty record and EVA Airline is one of the best in the world.

Point well made. I have flown both China Air and EVA and much prefer the latter.

For the record: I didn't mean to imply that all Taiwanese airlines are an F in safety.

Concorde had a perfect safety record, and in a matter of a couple minutes, it had among the worst.

Numbers of flight operations matter, too, when comparing safety records.

Although I'm not trying to compare it to China Airlines, which is truly among the worst on the planet, EVA has only been operating for a decade, and I'm not certain I would quickly mark them up as one of the best in the world.

Give them some flight cycles before passing verdict.

Greg

This would almost be funny if it wasn't nearly so dangerous. In Taiwan, one often sees motorcycles driving down the sidewalks instead of streets, and crossing normal to the flow of traffic. Also, I have found that many Taiwanese are quite economical, which is usually laudable, in that they will use just enough of something to get the job done, and no more... such as 6,000 feet of taxiway with a soft snow berm at the end.

I got curious and did a little more research. Take a look at this
diagram and see that these pseudopilots were really paying NO attention to what they were doing. It looks like they took off westbound on Taxiway K at the intersection of Taxiway R. The normal runway clearance for runway 32 is at K.

::shakes head:: God must have really wanted that plane to get off the ground.

(edited for typos)

[This message has been edited by eastwest (edited 01-27-2002).]

Here is a better link, they have a photo of the rwy looks like they only used about 6000+ feet of taixway.

http://www.airdisaster.com/news/0102/27/news.shtml

[This message has been edited by Jacque (edited 01-27-2002).]

Here's the follow up:

But many aviators told the Daily News that the Jan. 25 incident could have been a disaster if the temperature had not been just below zero that morning at the airport. Planes fly most efficiently in cold, dense air, they said. In warmer air, aircraft take longer to reach speeds necessary for takeoff.

The Airbus barely made its liftoff using 6,000 feet of the taxiway, several pilots said. If the mercury read 20 or 30 degrees, the aircraft would have accelerated more slowly, said Richard Harkness, a pilot for Era Aviation for more than 20 years.

Full story at: http://www.adn.com/front/story/766173p-818755c.html