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