A China Airlines Boeing 747-200 with 225 passengers and crew on board crashed into the sea shortly after takeoff Saturday en route from Taiwan to Hong Kong. Military search and rescue teams picked up the body of a man off the Taiwan-held Penghu islands, also known as the Pescadores, and spotted a cabin door, life vests and an oil slick. (Read photo caption)

Cable television station ETTV said large numbers of bodies were floating in the sea.

An official with China Airlines, Taiwan's main carrier, said the plane did not issue a Mayday call before it disappeared from radar screens about 20 minutes after takeoff.

There was no official word on what might have caused the crash, and Vice Transport Minister Chang Chia-juk said there was no evidence of a midair blast. "We did not find an explosion in the air," Chang told reporters.

However, cable network TVBS reported that a group of farmers in western Taiwan found debris with China Airlines' logo in their fields Saturday. TVBS showed footage of farmers in the coastal county of Changhua -- about 47 miles from the crash site -- holding up scraps of foam padding and inflight magazines.

"I heard a big bang," a fisherman identified only by the name Lee told ETTC cable television.

"I thought it was mainland fishermen dynamiting fish."

Dynamite is used illegally off the coast of Taiwan to stun fish and make them easy to catch as they float to the surface.
As night fell, naval ships with powerful searchlights joined the search for survivors.

The weather bureau reported cloud in the area but no rain at the time of the accident.

"Because it's at sea, we can't determine (what happened) before finding anything concrete. But basically, we have found some life vests floating at sea," Premier Yu Shyi-kun told reporters.

China Airlines said Flight CI 611 was carrying 206 passengers, including three infants, and 19 crew. The plane was almost 23 years old, one of the oldest in the fleet, and had logged almost 65,000 flight hours.

PHOTO CAPTION

A relative of passengers aboard a China Airlines Boeing 747-200 jet that crashed into the sea en route to Hong Kong from Taiwan waits outside of China Airlines headquarters in Taipei, May 25, 2002. Some 206 passengers and 19 crew were aboard the China Airlines flight when it disappeared from radar screens off the Taiwan-held island of Penghu, or the Pescadores. (Kenny Wu/Reuters)