HONG KONG - A China Airlines plane that crashed into the sea with 225 on board en route from Taipei to Hong Kong almost certainly disintegrated suddenly, an aviation expert in Hong Kong said.
"It is fairly certain the aircraft suddenly broke apart," Peter Lok Kung-nam, former director general of Hong Kong's Civil Aviation Department told Reuters.
"...there was absolutely no forewarning, no distress call, not even a secondary radar distress signal, the whole thing must have happened very quickly," Lok said.
Searchers scouring the sea have found no survivors so far.
Speculation about a mid-air explosion was heightened by television footage of farmers holding up debris from the Boeing 747-200 aircraft in the western Taiwan coastal county of Changhua, about 75 km (47 miles) from the crash site.
