Around the World

Report: Jet crashed into equipment

TAIPEI, Taiwan - The Singapore Airlines jumbo jet that crashed in Taipei during a heavy rainstorm tried to take off on the wrong runway and slammed into construction equipment being used to repair the strip, an official said early this morning.

The comment by prosecutor Soong Kuo-yeh came as officials from Taiwan, Singapore and the United States combed through the wreckage of the Boeing 747-400 at the start of their investigation, and as dozens of American citizens arrived in Taipei to claim the bodies of the victims.

The jetliner crashed late Tuesday night as a typhoon bore down on the capital, with high winds, heavy rains and low visibility, killing 81 of the 179 people aboard the flight from Taipei to Los Angeles. "From the crash scene, it's very easy to see that the plane had mistakenly used the wrong runway where there were scraps of steel and two construction cranes," said Soong, a prosecutor at the Taoyuan County district office where the Chiang Kai-shek airport is located. In an a live interview with ETTV cable TV news, he said the plane crashed after hitting the two cranes being used to repair the closed runway during the day.

Soong's remarks were the most specific account of what may have happened during the crash.

The official probe has not announced any conclusions. But it has concluded that the bulk of the wreckage ended up on the closed runway that ran parallel to the one the plane was supposed to use.

The pilot and some survivors of the crash also have said they felt the jet hit something just before the accident broke it into three pieces and set most of them on fire.

Another theory being discussed is that the plane began on the correct runway, then quickly lifted off to avoid an object blown into its path and crashed onto the closed runway.

Officials at Taiwan's Aviation Safety Council, which is leading the investigation, could not be

immediately reached for comment about the prosecutor's remark. In Singapore, an official at Singapore

First residents move into space station

KOROLYOV, Russia - One American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts moved into the international space station yesterday, swinging open the doors, flipping on the lights and making "the ship come alive" for years and possibly decades to come.

"It's a great moment for all of us," said the space station's commander, U.S. astronaut Bill Shepherd.

He and his crewmates, Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev, temporarily christened their ship Alpha --after getting permission.

"The first expedition on the space station requests permission to take the radio call sign Alpha," Shepherd called down to Daniel Goldin, head of the U.S. space agency NASA.

The crew put their right hands on top of one another as a show of unity to Goldin and the hundreds of others watching from Russian Mission Control outside Moscow. They had been pushing for a name for years, with Alpha at the top of the list.

Goldin, no fan of Alpha or any other name except international space station, was taken aback. But he laughed and told the men to go ahead and call the space station Alpha for their four-month mission.

Just minutes earlier in an interview with reporters, Goldin had pooh-poohed the need for a name.

And the president of spacecraft builder Energia, Yuri Semyonov, said he disliked the name Alpha because it implies first and Russia's space station Mir was around long before.

Semyonov suggested Beta as a name, or Mir 2.

The three men arrived aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule yesterday and docked smoothly with the station as the two craft zoomed 240 miles above Kazakstan.

Russian Mission Control erupted in applause when contact was confirmed and again a few hours later, when the trio appeared on giant video screens. They posed inside the main living module, called Zvezda, Russian for Star, dressed in blue jumpsuits and white jerseys.

"Let's look upon this as the real opening of the international space frontier," Goldin said. He called it a stepping stone to Mars and the rest of the solar system.

Replied Shepherd: "We're just starting a long journey."

Krikalev noted the years of delay in building the space station. "Now we are finally on the station ready to take care of it," he said.