HONG KONG – “We had just gotten off the ground when I heard a very loud roar, and the plane seemed to be crushed by an invisible downward force. Then the crash against the track and flames and fire everywhere.” Antonio La Ciglia screams like on the phone from Taiwan, as if screaming he could throw off all the terror lived in those few fatal minutes of the Singapore Airlines flight, departed from the Chiank Kai Sheck airport in Taipei for Los Angeles at 11.10pm yesterday night and crashed to the ground a few seconds later, immediately after take-off. He, a Filipino from Luzon, was going there to find relatives in America. The ambulances and emergency vehicles, arrived on the wet track a few minutes after the crash, found themselves facing an apocalyptic image: the carcass of the plane burned with very high flames and on the blue fuselage you could see a big hole opened on the roof, perhaps due to an explosion as a result of the collision on the ground. The Boeing commander stated that the aircraft “hit something on the runway” at the time of take-off. But a statement from a Singapore airlines spokesman in Los Angeles that the plane would crash into an empty China Airlines aircraft was not confirmed. According to the managers of Singapore Airlines, the death of 65 of the 179 people on board is ascertained, but 35 are lacking in the appeal and the chances that among these there are survivors are very weak. Another 68 passengers are hospitalized in serious condition. The Taiwanese prime minister said that “there are probably more than a hundred dead”.

Moreover the same dynamic of the tragedy and the testimonies of the survivors leave no doubt: “It was raining very hard. When I arrived at the airport the weather conditions were so bad that I asked the Singapore Airlines staff if the plane would leave. they replied: “We always do it, it’s okay. I told my wife: I can’t believe they’ll leave,” a witness, John Diaz, said by phone from Taipei. “We heard this very loud noise,” says another survivor, “the lights went out, flames came up and at that point we realized that the plane had crashed and we thought we would all die … We tried to open the back emergency door in the back, but it didn’t open, we tried to reach the front one and we saw that the whole plane was broken in two “. Eighty-two people were hospitalized in three Taipei hospitals, many with very severe burns on fifty percent of the body. And among the wounded extracted from the remains of the plane there would be some “in very bad condition” according to the statements of a doctor from the Taipei hospital. 81 of the 179 people on board are from Taiwan.

Of the other 98 the nationality is not known. The passenger list, however, leaves open the possibility that there are also Italians on board. “But it’s hard to say for now,” explains a Singapore official at Taipei Airport, Wilson Heng. “Many passengers are Filipinos, and as we know Filipino surnames often sound like Spanish, or Latin or, indeed, Italians”. On the flight many were the Taiwanese businessmen headed to America and many also the Taiwanese who went to America to find emigrant relatives; in Los Angeles and San Francisco, two cities with the largest Asian communities in the United States. It is difficult for the time being to reconstruct exactly the dynamics of the disaster. Certainly on the island of Taiwan very strong winds blew with sudden gusts, which are now affecting the whole region, from the Filipino archipelago to Hong Kong and the southern Chinese coast. A tropical typhoon is expected on Taipei which has already caused dozens of deaths in the Philippines