Taiwan TransAsia plane crash: Families of victims offered £307,000 compensation

Taiwan's TransAsia Airways has announced that families who lost loved-ones in the tragic plane crash on 4 February, 2015, will be entitled to almost half a million US dollars in compensation.

"We offered an amount of TW$14.9m, (US$472,807; £307,000) as compensation for each person who died in the accident. We hope to reach a settlement with the families," a TransAsia spokesman told AFP.

At least 42 people out of 53 passengers were killed when the TransAsia Airways Flight GE235 crashed into the Keeling River, minutes after taking off from Taipei's Songshan Airport.

Footage from a dashboard camera showed the plane's wing clipping an overpass after narrowly missing apartment buildings by metres.

The compensation deal for each family follows negotiations between the airline and representatives of the families.

A TransAsia spokesman said: "We hope to reach a settlement with the families. We can fully understand that it would be hard for the families to accept it immediately. Still we hope the representatives could take the proposal back and take it into consideration."

It comes as 10 of TransAsia's 49 ATR pilots were suspended after failing oral proficiency tests for basic operation and emergency procedures.

The pilots have been sent on a one-month retraining course following the tests which were ordered by Taiwanese flight regulator Civil Aeronautics Administration as a result of last week's crash.

The cause of the crash has still not been established but information from the black boxes showed the plane's right engine had "flamed out" after two minutes from take-off.

Taiwan's Aviation Safety Council said the left engine was shut down manually for unknown reasons with experts believing the pilots may have caused the crash by turning off the wrong engine.