05 English Assignment (Grace Tan Soo Woon)

1. Horrible Weather Conditions

The "tropical storm Xangsan, which had caused devastation across the Philippines, was approaching Taiwan" at that time, causing "winds of up to 144kph" as well as heavy rain which lead to poor visibility. This cause have contributed to the pilots' misconception of which runway they were using and could have thus went onto the wrong runway, resulting in the accident.

2. Not cordoning the runway under construction

The "disused strip at Taipei had not been completely blocked off because it was frequently used for taxi-ing aircraft", which was against the International airport regulations that stated the requirement of a runway currently undergoing repair to be cordoned off. The airport only erected a concrete block barrier "1,000 metres down the runway at the beginning of the construction zone and marked with a light." There was heavy rain that day, and the light and barrier may not have been easily visible to the pilot, so he might have thought the runway was free for use due to the airport not cordoning off the runway, so it may not have been the pilots' fault but rather the lack of following regulations that lead to the accident.

3. Possible lack of lighting on the runways

CAA spokesman Kay Yong said that "the centre lights—green on the closed runway and white on the active one—were on." However, the passage also states that "investigators have yet to determine whether the 'edge lights' running along the sides of the closed runway were on or off." The passage also continues with stating another statement from Mr Yong, "If the lights on the runway were not on, then the runway would not have looked like a runway". If the side lights were really off, the pilots are not at fault for accidentally crashing the plane into the construction and concrete barrier, as they not only could not see clearly int he horrible weather conditions, they also could not make out which runway was which.

4. Not notifying aircrew about ongoing construction

"According to San Francisco-based attorney Gerald Sterns, who specializes in representing air crash victims' families, under such conditions the control tower should have warned the pilots by radio about the closed runway. 'The 'black box cockpit recorder indicated that wasn't done with the Singapore Airlines flight,'" This shows that there is no notification what so ever on the construction site on the runway close to the one the pilots were supposed to use, so the pilots cannot be blamed for not knowing the existence of the road block and be wary of it before crashing the plane into the barrier.

5. Under-equipped control tower

The passage also states "The airport is not equipped with ground radar so the control tower could not visually check if the plane was on the correct runway." In addition, "visibility was too low to physically see the jet from the tower", so in this case, the tower had no visuals on the plane and its movements, and are unable to warn the pilots on where they are heading to or whether they were going to crash into the construction barriers, so the pilots, not knowing about the construction and where they were heading to cannot be blamed from driving the plane straight into the barrier erected 1,000m along the runway.