China Airlines Flight 611 departed Chiang Kai-shek International Airport at 3:08 p.m. local time, bound for Hong Kong with 206 passengers and 19 crew members. The flight crew was experienced: Captain Yi Ching-Fong had over 10,100 hours of flight time, as did First Officer Shieh Yea-Shyong, while Flight Engineer Chao Sen-Kuo had logged more than 19,100 hours. At 3:16 p.m., the aircraft was cleared to climb to flight level 350. Seventeen minutes later, as the 747 approached its cruising altitude of 35,000 feet over the Taiwan Strait, approximately 23 nautical miles northeast of the Penghu Islands, contact was lost. Two Cathay Pacific aircraft nearby received the plane's emergency locator signals. There were no survivors.

The aircraft itself, registration B-18255, was a 23-year-old Boeing 747-200 delivered new to China Airlines on 2 August 1979. By 2002, it was the last 747-200 passenger aircraft in the airline's fleet, having accumulated over 64,800 flight hours. The airline had already sold it to Orient Thai Airlines for US$1.45 million. The accident flight was to be its penultimate flight for China Airlines; after one more round trip to Hong Kong, the aircraft would have been delivered to its new owner. Instead, it broke apart over open water. Radar data showed the fuselage separating into four major sections at altitude. Debris rained across the strait and beyond. Lighter items -- magazines, photographs, luggage, safety cards, a blood-stained pillow case embossed with the China Airlines logo -- were found up to 130 kilometers away in villages in central Taiwan, including the city of Changhua.

The Aviation Safety Council's investigation traced the breakup to the 1980 tail strike at Kai Tak Airport. During the repair, a doubler plate was not installed to Boeing's standards. The exposed scratches on the fuselage skin became nucleation points for metal fatigue. Over 22 years and thousands of pressurization cycles, cracks grew until the fuselage failed catastrophically at section 46, aft of the main wing box. Rapid decompression followed. The forward fuselage entered an abrupt descent, and all four engines separated from the wings as their fuse pins failed at approximately 29,000 feet. One piece of overlooked evidence might have prevented everything: photographs from maintenance records showed discoloration on the damaged tail section, which investigators later determined were tar stains from decades of onboard cigarette smoke, permitted on China Airlines flights until 1995. Had anyone investigated those stains, the cracks would have been discovered.

Flight 611 was not the first Boeing 747 destroyed by a botched tail strike repair. On 12 August 1985, Japan Air Lines Flight 123 crashed after its vertical stabilizer was torn off by explosive decompression caused by an improperly repaired rear pressure bulkhead, damaged in a 1978 tail strike. That accident killed 520 of 524 people on board. In both cases, a repair was not performed according to Boeing standards. The parallel is haunting: two different airlines, two different decades, the same fundamental failure. The lessons of Flight 123, which occurred five years after the China Airlines tail strike repair and seventeen years before Flight 611 disintegrated, did not prevent the catastrophe over the Taiwan Strait.

Of the 225 people on board, remains of 175 were recovered and identified. The first 82 bodies were found floating on the surface of the Taiwan Strait and recovered by fishing boats and military vessels. The governments of Taiwan and the People's Republic of China cooperated in the recovery, with Beijing allowing Taiwanese personnel to search waters under PRC control. Relatives submitted blood samples for DNA testing. The passengers had included Taiwanese politician You Jih-cheng and two reporters from the United Daily News. Many had been en route to mainland China but were forced to connect through Hong Kong because no direct flights existed between Taiwan and the mainland. Grieving families pointed to this fact, arguing the flight should never have been necessary. Flight 611 remains the deadliest aviation disaster in Taiwan's history.