Taipei "near miss" on ground?

[spleener]

Local media "report"....:

A private aircraft flown from Phuket has narrowly escaped colliding with a passenger jet carrying 288 passengers in a potentially tragic mixup at Taiwan's Taoyuan International Airport.

The Hong Kong-bound China Airlines flight, accelerating to 250 kph, was seven seconds from hitting the taxiing private plane, officials said.

Pilots on the A330-300 jammed on its brakes and managed to avoid hitting the small private plane on the runway in Friday's dramatic near-miss.


An investigation into the incident is now underway. Taoyuan is Taiwan's largest and busiest airport.

A Taiwan newspaper reported that the private plane from Phuket ignored the control tower's instructions after landing and taxied to the runway as the China Airlines plane was taking off.

Two South Africans flew to Phuket last weekend on a Sling single-engine four-seater prototype aircraft, landing at Phuket's private Airpark strip and planning to undertake the 19-hour journey to Taiwan later in the week.

The pilots, James Pitman and Jean d'Assonville of the Airplane Factory in Johannesburg, are on a round-the-world trip.

No injuries were reported in Friday's dramatic near-miss, but the Hong Kong flight had to be delayed for two hours as engineers checked for possible damage to the aircraft, officials said.

The South Africa-registered private plane was scheduled to leave Taiwan today, the officials added.

[Tembani]

There was no "dramatic near miss". Here is what happened from the pilot himself.
OK, so that’s the rules. What a pity I have, in the same post, to write about the China 919 question! Actually, Jean and I only found out about the fiasco when my brother Andrew directed us to our own Facebook page late last night! After we landed ATC ground instructed us to taxi by taxiway “November Charlie to the end”. We were already on a taxiway, the name of which I don’t recall. I was on the radio, Jean driving. We came to a multi-directional crossing about 40 meters off the active runway and I asked which way we should go. As it turned out November Charlie was marked with two boards, but it did an acute angle there, one sharp right, back towards the active runway at a gentle angle, the other gentle right, curving to parallel with the runway. The ATC said “turn right onto November Charlie”. Jean assumed he meant hard right, so commenced turning. ATC quickly chipped in “No, no”, so Jean continued the turn, on a tickie, doing a 360, and then headed off at the gentle right angle.

Even if we’d gone down the sharp right ‘on-ramp’ to the runway, it was a good 50 metres to the active runway junction and the “stop line” was a good 30 meters from where we were. Anyhow, being on the ground frequency, we didn’t even realise that there’d been any consequence, since the China 919 flight was obviously on the tower frequency already. Hence we discovered that there’d been problems only when this popped up on our Facebook page after we got to the hotel (we’d even spent three quarters of an hour on the far apron refueling and it wasn’t brought to our attention!). What must have happened is that the China Airlines flight was already rolling and saw us doing a turn back towards the runway. Although there was a good 50 meters for us to run to get to the active runway on that taxiway, it was at an acute angle, which perhaps he couldn’t see, so perpendicularly we were probably only 20 meters off the runway. Anyhow, he probably just thought “What the hell are these lunatics in this little mosquito doing? I’m not going to take any chances, I’m hitting the brakes.” I assume that he must have hit them pretty hard and somehow burst a tyre. Hhhmmm, what a pity – it kind of bursts my bubble a bit – I thought we’d been doing so well. Anyhow, life has a habit of bumping you down a couple of rungs just when you think you’re up!

Taiwan is a hectic place by first impressions, and we’ll now head off to see central Taipei. It looks like we won’t be getting out of here tomorrow for Japan, as we’d initially hoped, but as SA wakes up and we get updates on that, we’ll report.

Cheers, James and Jean

Follow their trip on AvCom - Your Aviation Community (http://www.avcom.co.za)

[TWN PPL]

Never is too dramatic when you are the one causing the drama.
Then again, newspaper always likes to exaggerate.

[spleener]

Tembani, thanks for clearing that up then! Welcome to the "Big" world where the 2nd :) hardest part is the ground ops. Best wishes and safe flying for the rest of your journey. Cheers!:ok:

Meanwhile, a well done to TPE ATC and/or CI919 for their vigilance.

[armchairpilot94116]

Wondering out loud here, very sure there are good reasons but I would've thought having them land in TAipei SungShan would be better then landing at TPE ? The former is much less busy then the latter .

Or even less busy would be Taichung Airport which is much much less busy. And with the High Speed Rail, our light plane pilots can be up in Taipei pretty quickly.