TAIPEI, Taiwan — A Singapore Airlines 747 jetliner taking off for Los Angeles was slammed back onto the runway in high winds Tuesday night, injuring at least 30 people, officials said.
Singapore Airlines spokesman James Boyd said in Los Angeles that there were no known fatalities among the 179 people on board Flight SQ006. Most of the injuries did not appear serious, officials in Taipei said.
Strong winds from a typhoon offshore seemed to have forced the plane down at Taipei's Chiang Kai-shek International Airport, emergency official Wu Bi-chang said. Afterward, parts of the plane's blue fuselage appeared badly charred, with a gaping hole in the roof of the forward section.
The crash occurred at 11:18 p.m., and rescue workers were being dispatched to the scene, Wu said. Minutes later, the flashing lights of ambulances and rescue vehicles were visible on the wet tarmac. Local media reports said there was a fire on the runway after the crash but that it had been extinguished.
John Diaz, a passenger on the flight, said flames "shot up right next to me" as the plane tried to take off. He said there was "heavy, heavy rain" at the time.
"When I got the airport conditions were so bad, and I asked them, 'is the flight going to take off?' " Diaz told CNN. "And they said, 'we do this all the time, it's fine.' "
Another passenger identified only as Paul told CNN "there was a very loud noise, the lights went out, the flames came across, and we realized that at that point the plane crashed, and we thought we were all going to die."
"We tried to get the back emergency exit open," he said. "We couldn't get it open, we tried to make our way to the front and basically we saw the whole plane was broken in two."