Pilot"s mayday call cited "engine flameout" in deadly Taiwan plane crash - Video captures Taiwan plane crash that killed 31 - WATCH DRAMATIC VIDEO : TransAsia plane crash

TAIPEI, Taiwan –  A pilot of TransAsia Airways Flight 235 said “mayday, mayday, engine flameout” moments before the propjet banked sharply and crashed into a river, an aviation official said Thursday, but declined to comment on a possible cause for the accident.

Engine flameout refers to flames being extinguished in the combustion chamber of the engine, so that it shuts down and no longer drives the propeller. Causes of a flameout could include a lack of fuel or being struck by volcanic ash, a bird or some other object. “Mayday” is an international emergency call.

Video images of the plane’s final moments in the air captured on car dashboard cameras appear to show the left engine’s propeller at standstill as the aircraft turned sharply over Taipei, with its wings going vertical and clipping a highway bridge before plunging into the Keelung River on Wednesday.

At least 31 people on board were killed, and 15 people were injured, including a toddler and his father. The search continued for 12 people still missing.

An audio recording of the pilot’s communications with the control tower at takeoff and during the minutes-long flight were widely broadcast. A Taiwan Civil Aeronautical Administration official who declined to be named confirmed the distress call and its wording Thursday, but did not say how it might relate to a cause for the crash.

About 10 Taipei fire agency divers were looking for any more bodies that may be at the cold river bottom. A crane was used to bring the rear section of the plane to the shore Wednesday night. The fuselage was largely dismantled by hydraulic rescue tools and now lay alongside recovered luggage.

At midday Thursday, about a dozen relatives of Taiwanese victims arrived at the riverbank in the capital to perform traditional mourning rituals. Accompanied by Buddhist monks ringing brass bells, they bowed to the river and held aloft cloth inscriptions tied to pieces of bamboo meant to guide the spirits of the dead to rest.

Police diver Cheng Ying-chih said search and rescue efforts were being hampered by “zero visibility” in the turbid river and cold water temperatures that were forcing divers to work on one-hour shifts.

He said the front of the plane had broken into numerous pieces, making the job all the more difficult.

“We’re looking at a very tough search and rescue job,” Cheng told reporters gathered on the river bank beside the wreckage where luggage had been removed and placed in neat rows.

The mangled rear part of the fuselage lay upside down, its wings and tail assembly sheared off and multiple holes torn into its side.

Soldiers and rescue workers worked to shore up the bank with sandbags and steel plates in preparation for lifting further wreckage under cloudy skies. Relatives of some of the Taiwanese victims were expected to visit the scene to carry out traditional Buddhist mourning rituals.

The pilots’ actions in the flights final moments have led to speculation that they attempted to avoid high-rise buildings by following the line of the river and then banked sharply in an attempt to bring it down in the water rather than crash on land. Taiwan’s aviation authority said it had no evidence of that.

Both the administration and the airline, Taipei-based TransAsia Airways, declined to speculate on causes for the crash at about 10:55 a.m. Wednesday near the capital city’s downtown airport. The plane’s black box was found overnight. The pilots’ bodies have not yet been recovered.

The crashed aircraft, which is less than a year old, had once changed an engine, TransAsia Airways Vice President Wang Cheng-chung told a news conference Wednesday. He said the original one was returned to the manufacturer, Pratt & Whitney Canada, after a glitch was found.

“P&WC gave a complete, brand new engine to TransAsia . and installed it for us,” Wang said.

The engine was replaced in April before the aircraft went into use, an airline publicist said.

The ATR 72 turbo-propeller jet suddenly banked 90 degrees within two minutes of takeoff and descended on its side into the Keelung River. It clipped a bridge and a taxi moments before the crash, injuring the driver and a passenger.

Relatives of some of the 31 passengers from China will reach Taipei on a charter flight Thursday afternoon. Local television filmed a mainland Chinese man scolding a travel agency for its handling of injured passengers.

The 15 people who survived the crash were pulled from the open door of a relatively unscathed portion of the fuselage which jutting above the river’s surface after the crash.

Among the survivors was a family of three, including a 2-year-old boy whose heart stopped beating after three minutes under water. He recovered after receiving CPR, his brother Lin Ming-yi told reporters.

Another ATR 72 operated by the same Taipei-based airline crashed in the outlying Taiwan-controlled islands of Penghu last July 23, killing 48 at the end of a typhoon for reasons that are still under investigation.

ATR, a French-Italian consortium based in Toulouse, France, said it was sending a team to Taiwan to help in the investigation.

The ATR 72-600 that crashed Wednesday is manufacturer’s best plane model, and the pilot had 4,900 hours of flying experience, said Lin Chih-ming of the Civil Aeronautics Administration.

The plane has a general good reputation for safety and reliability and is known among airlines for being cheap and efficient to use, said Greg Waldron, Asia managing editor at Flightglobal magazine in Singapore. About 1,200 of the planes are currently in use worldwide.

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Pilot"s mayday call cited "engine flameout" in deadly Taiwan plane crash - Video captures Taiwan plane crash that killed 31 - WATCH DRAMATIC VIDEO : TransAsia plane crash

Dramatic decline of Caribbean corals can be reversed – study

WASHINGTON D.C., United States, Friday July 4, 2014, CMC - A new study has found that the dramatic decline of Caribbean coral reefs can be reversed.

The study by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network (GCRMN), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), has also found that Caribbean corals have declined by more than 50 percent since the 1970s.

But according to the authors, restoring parrotfish populations and improving other management strategies, such as protection from overfishing and excessive coastal pollution, could help the reefs recover and make them more resilient to future climate change impacts.

“The rate at which the Caribbean corals have been declining is truly alarming,” said Carl Gustaf Lundin, director of the Washington-based IUCN’s Global Marine and Polar Programme.

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“But this study brings some very encouraging news. The fate of Caribbean corals is not beyond our control, and there are some very concrete steps that we can take to help them recover.”

With only about one-sixth of the original coral cover left, the study finds that most Caribbean coral reefs may disappear in the next 20 years, primarily due to the loss of grazers in the region.

According to the IUCN, the world’s oldest and largest global environmental organization, the study, “Status and Trends of Caribbean Coral Reefs: 1970-2012,” is the most detailed and comprehensive study of its kind published to date.

It said the study is the result of the work of 90 experts over the course of three years.

IUCN said the study contains the analysis of more than 35,000 surveys conducted at 90 Caribbean locations since 1970, including studies of corals, seaweeds, grazing sea urchins and fish.

The report shows that while climate change has long been thought to be the main culprit in coral degradation, it poses a serious threat by making oceans more acidic and causing coral bleaching.

The report finds that the loss of parrotfish and sea urchin – the area’s two main grazers – has, in fact, been the key driver of coral decline in the region.

It says that an unidentified disease led to a mass mortality of the sea urchin in 1983, adding that extreme fishing throughout the 20th century has brought the parrotfish population to the brink of extinction in some regions.

“The loss of these species breaks the delicate balance of coral ecosystems and allows algae, on which they feed, to smother the reefs,” the report says, noting that reefs protected from overfishing, as well as other threats, such as excessive coastal pollution, tourism and coastal development, are more resilient to pressures from climate change.

“Even if we could somehow make climate change disappear tomorrow, these reefs would continue their decline,” warned Jeremy Jackson, lead author of the report and IUCN’s senior advisor on coral reefs.

“We must immediately address the grazing problem for the reefs to stand any chance of surviving future climate shifts,” he added.

The study also shows that some of the healthiest Caribbean coral reefs are those that harbour vigorous populations of grazing parrotfish.

These include the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary in the northern Gulf of Mexico, Bermuda and Bonaire, “all of which have restricted or banned fishing practices that harm parrotfish, such as fish traps and spearfishing”.

The study is urging other countries to follow suit.

“Barbuda is about to ban all catches of parrotfish and grazing sea urchins, and set aside one-third of its coastal waters as marine reserves,” said Ayana Johnson of the Waitt Institute’s Blue Halo Initiative, which is collaborating with Barbuda in the development of its new management plan.

“This is the kind of aggressive management that needs to be replicated regionally if we are going to increase the resilience of Caribbean reefs,” she added.

The IUCN said that reefs where parrotfish are not protected have suffered tragic declines, including Jamaica, the entire Florida Reef Tract from Miami to Key West, and the US Virgin Islands.

The IUCN said the Caribbean is home to nine per cent of the world’s coral reefs, which are one of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet.

It said Caribbean reefs, spanning a total of 38 countries, are vital to the region’s economy, generating more than three billion US dollars annually from tourism and fisheries, and over a hundred times more in other goods and services, on which more than 43 million people depend.

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Dramatic decline of Caribbean corals can be reversed – study

The Netherlands reach quarter-finals with dramatic come from behind 2-1 win over Mexico

By Patrick R. Anderson

The Flying Dutchmen left it late.

But they demonstrated their pedigree with a gutsy performance at the Estadio Castelao in Fortaleza, with a capacity 58,817 crowd cheering wildly in the baking sunlight, by defeating Mexico 2-1 in a heartbreaker for CONCACAF.

With Mexico showing a greater zest in midfield with their 5-3-2 formation, Netherlands were seemingly in wonderland for most of the first half. Only Arjen Robben seemed to trouble the Mexicans with his darting runs, although the Mexicans countered tactically by keeping Robben close to the touchlines and double teaming him when he got there.

Guardado, Salcido, Herrera and Peralta made life difficult for the Dutch, controlling the midfield and distributing the passes with disdain in the Sunday afternoon heat which sweltered around the shoulders of the Dutchmen.

At the half it was 0-0.

Three minutes into the second half, Mexico broke through with a deserved goal, which was made on the sheer brilliance of Giovanni Dos Santos. From 25 yards away on the left channel, Dos Santos received a pass under pressure from two defenders manning the defensive zones. But Dos Santos surprised the Dutch goalkeeper Jasper Cillessen, by driving a left footed shot to his leftside, leaving  him without a prayer.

Mexico 1, Netherlands 0.

Mexico turned up the heat on the Dutch with some exciting gallery play and touch football, and although slowing down considerably as the match wore on, and the Dutch starting to run even more, the Mexicans’ concentration waned at the wrong time. From a corner kick, a loose ball found Wesley Sneijder, 23 yards on the left side, and he drove a ferocious right footed shot past the brilliant Mexican goalkeeper Guillermo Ochoa, who didn’t even move as the ball zipped past him to his right.

Mexico 1, Netherlands 1.

Sneijder’s goal came in the 88th minute. The Dutch by this time were not done and went for the winner. Coach Louis Van Gaal took out a tired and listless Robin Van Persie in the 76th minute and replaced him with Klaas Jan Huntelaar. And it was Huntelaar who would be the hero, despite the Dutch getting a wake up call with a tough and pesky Mexican team.

Robben entered the penalty box and ended up on the right byline, where skipper Rafael Marquez’s right boot tripped Robben and the decision by Portuguese referee Pedro Proenca was clear.

A penalty.

And Huntelaar stepped up in the 90th  + 3mins added on to send Ochoa the wrong way for the winning goal. And the Netherlands were through to the last eight on July 5. They had pulled off a great escape similar to Brasil’s on Saturday versus Chile. The  Netherlands won 2-1.

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The Netherlands reach quarter-finals with dramatic come from behind 2-1 win over Mexico