The flight departed Chiang Kai-shek International Airport in Taipei at 4:53 PM local time, bound for Nagoya on a route flown countless times before. Captain Wang Lo-chi, 42, and First Officer Chuang Meng-jung, 26, managed an uneventful crossing of the East China Sea. The descent began at 7:47 PM, and by 8:12 PM the aircraft had passed the outer marker, aligned with the runway and descending through the darkness toward the lights of Nagoya below. The weather was cooperating. The passengers had no reason to expect anything but a smooth arrival. Among the 256 people in the cabin were Japanese, Taiwanese, Filipino, and Chinese nationals heading home or traveling for business. The aircraft itself was practically new -- an Airbus A300B4-622R delivered to China Airlines just three years earlier in 1991, with only 8,572 flight hours on its airframe.

Just short of the runway threshold, First Officer Chuang inadvertently activated the takeoff/go-around lever, known as TO/GA. This single action told the autopilot to abandon the landing and climb. The crew recognized something was wrong immediately and pushed the control yoke forward, manually reducing the throttles to counteract the unwanted climb command. But they made a critical omission: they never disconnected the autopilot. The automated system, faithfully executing the go-around command it had received, fought back. It drove the horizontal stabilizer to its full nose-up position, working to override the pilots' manual inputs. The aircraft became a tug-of-war between human muscle and computer logic. When the crew finally decided to execute a manual go-around, they pulled back on the yoke, unknowingly adding their own force to the autopilot's already extreme nose-up command. The combined pitch sent the aircraft into a steep, unsustainable climb. Airspeed bled away. At 8:15 PM, the aerodynamic stall was complete and irreversible.

The Airbus struck the ground nose-first beside the runway at Nagoya Airport. Of the 271 people aboard -- 256 passengers and 15 crew members -- 264 perished. Seven passengers survived, all seated in rows 7 through 15 near the front of the cabin. Among the survivors was a three-year-old child. Sylvanie Detonio, one of the survivors able to speak to investigators the following day, reported that passengers received no warning before the impact. The crash remains the deadliest accident in the history of China Airlines and the second deadliest aviation disaster in Japanese history, exceeded only by the 1985 crash of Japan Air Lines Flight 123 that killed 520 people. It also stands as the third deadliest accident involving an Airbus A300.

Investigators from the Japanese Aircraft Accident Investigation Commission traced the disaster to a fundamental breakdown in crew coordination with automated systems. The A300-600R's autopilot was designed to be authoritative -- when given a command, it would use all available control surfaces to execute it, including the horizontal stabilizer. Previous 'out-of-trim incidents' with this aircraft type had been documented, situations where the autopilot's stabilizer inputs created forces difficult for pilots to overcome manually. The investigation found that while the initial TO/GA activation was accidental, the crew's failure to disconnect the autopilot before attempting to override it was the fatal error. The autopilot was doing exactly what it was told; the pilots simply did not realize it was still listening to the go-around command. In the aftermath, the Japanese Civil Aviation Authority ordered China Airlines to provide supplementary training for all A300-600R pilots, and the accident drove broader industry conversations about automation philosophy in cockpit design.

Japanese prosecutors declined to file criminal charges against China Airlines' senior management, concluding that the airline's training standards were comparable to industry norms. The pilots themselves could not face prosecution -- they had died in the crash. Bereaved families and survivors pursued civil action, and in December 2003, the Nagoya District Court ordered China Airlines to pay a combined 5 billion yen in compensation to 232 plaintiffs. Airbus was cleared of liability. Some families found the award insufficient, and a further class action resulted in an April 2007 settlement in which the airline formally apologized and provided additional compensation. A memorial stands near the crash site at what is now Nagoya Airfield, where services continue to be held. On April 26, 2024, mourners gathered for the 30th anniversary ceremony, a solemn reminder that the gap between human intuition and machine obedience can close with devastating speed.