The pilot of a passenger plane that crashed in Taiwan killing 43 people shut down the aircraft's only working engine, exclaiming: "Wow, pulled back wrong throttle," seconds before the disaster, investigators said Thursday.
TransAsia Airways flight GE235 clipped a bridge and plunged into a river shortly after takeoff from Taipei's Songshan airport in February with 53 passengers and five crew on board.
Only 15 people survived.
Disturbing cockpit transcripts released by Taiwan's Aviation Safety Council revealed the pilots trying to deal with an engine that had lost power, but then reducing the thrust of the other, functioning engine.
Yesterday's report said the plane climbed to 365 meters before a warning alarm sounded, which indicated that the plane's second engine had undergone "flameout at takeoff."
Despite the warning signal, the pilot at the controls is heard to say: "I will pull back engine one throttle."
Chaos then ensued with both engines failing as the pilots tried to restart them in the few seconds left before the crash.
The last words from the black box recordings were the monitoring pilot shouting: "Impact, impact, brace for impact."
Dramatic car dashcam images at the time showed the plane hitting an elevated road as it banked steeply away from buildings before crashing into the Keelung River.
"As the pilot pulled back the wrong throttle, for some time both engines were powerless," said Thomas Wang, head of the aviation council.
Wang also confirmed previous reports that the pilot had failed a simulator test for engine failure on takeoff last year, but that he had passed a later retake.
Investigators refused to name the pilot at the controls.
However, reports at the time of the crash identified him as Liao Chien-tsung.
Initially Liao was hailed as a hero for his efforts in steering the plane away from houses and into the river as it came hurtling down.
Liao's distraught parents defended their son following the release of the report.
"At the end of the day, my son is dead, either as a 'hero' or being blamed is meaningless to us now," Liao's father Liao Hsien-ming, told the United Evening News.
He said he still felt proud of his son because he had tried to reduce casualties on the ground in the final seconds before the crash, as the plane dodged buildings to plunge into the river.
"Why the pilot did this, we don't know. That's the main task for our analysis report," said Wang over the decision to pull back the throttle on engine one.
The draft of that report is due out in November with the final version expected in April 2016.
Yesterday's evidence was described as a "factual report" giving more detail about the crash, but not attributing responsibility or drawing final conclusions about the cause.
TransAsia officials did not comment on the findings at a press conference but said that following the crash they had stepped up pilot training and brought in new safety experts, according to local media reports.
Taiwan's aviation regulator ordered TransAsia pilots to take an oral test on basic operating and emergency procedures for the French-made aircraft after the initial findings pointed to pilot error.
