Taipei's airport record under scrutiny

Mourners from the Taipei plane disaster of 1998

The BBC's David Bamford examines the safety record of Chiang Kai-Shek airport

The crash of the Singapore Airlines jumbo jet in Taiwan is the second major accident to take place at Taipei's Chiang Kai-Shek airport in three years.

More than 200 people were killed in February 1998 when a China Airlines Airbus hit a building as it was making its landing approach.

Chiang-Kai Shek airport was opened in 1979 to replace the ramshackle Chung Shan airport, which was situated in the middle of Taipei's urban area and regarded as a hazardous landing zone by pilots.

The new airport is 40km south of the city on a large flat area of land close to the ocean.

There have been persistent safety concerns at the airport prompted by the huge increase in its usage during the past 20 years.

As Taiwan has opened up to the world out of the political shadow of mainland China, so the number of passengers to Taipei has grown from two million per year to 17 million.

The number of flights has quadrupled and then quadrupled again in that time.

A second terminal has opened and a third one is being planned.

Runway controversy

The airport now has three runways, two of them running parallel.

It was on one of these parallel runways, O-5-L, that the ill-fated jumbo jet was scheduled to use for its take-off.

Its wreckage is strewn over that runway and its neighbour 0-5-R, which was closed for repairs and on which cranes and building equipment were positioned.

For the plane to have been using the wrong runway - or to have come into contact with building equipment - would have involved a major human error.

For now airport officials are rejecting this claim.

Questions are still being asked about how the disaster two-and-a-half-years ago could have happened, when an incoming plane - directed to land on one of the parallel runways - managed to hit a building, killing all 203 people on board.