No clues yet in Taiwan air crash
     TAIPEI - Feb 23, 1998 08:06 a.m. EST - Partial analysis of a
 "black box" flight recorder retrieved from Taiwan's worst air crash
 has failed to yield any clues to the cause of the disaster,
 officials said on Monday.
     Experts had extracted some data from the cockpit voice recorder
 but not enough to form any theory about what caused the China Air-
 lines' Airbus ARBU.CN A300-600R jet to crash on landing in Taipei
 last week, killing 202 people, aviation authorities said.
    Extraction of information from the flight data recorder, a device
 that monitors and records all of an aircraft's functions, could take
 a few more days, said an official at Taiwan's Civil Aeronautics
 Administration.
     "We have obtained only partial numerical data decoding from the
 'black box'," the official said by telephone. "The existing infor-
 mation is insufficient to make any conclusion.  We will make our
 conclusion after receiving all information."
     The official said complete information was expected as early as
 Wednesday from experts in Australia, where the devices were sent.
     Monday brought a fresh aviation scare for the island as a Boeing
 757 operated by Taiwan's Far Eastern Air Transport Corp partly skid-
 ded off a runway after landing at Taipei's downtown domestic airport.
     No one was injured in the incident, which occurred in heavy rain
 and fog. Officials said 126 people, including crew, were aboard.
     China Airlines' Flight 676, bringing vacationers home from Indo-
 nesia, crashed in a fireball at Taipei's international airport on
 Feb 16, killing all 196 aboard and six people on the ground.
     The bodies of two of five American citizens killed in the crash
 were shipped home on Monday. Another has been identified and was
 expected to be released soon while two others had yet to be iden-
 tified, officials said.
     Despite analysts' pessimistic outlook for China Airlines, the
 carrier's stock has managed a rebound in recent sessions on specu-
 lative buying after tumbling sharply in the days after the crash.
     China Airlines's shares posted their third straight rebound
 following three losing sessions -- two of them by the daily seven
 percent limit. They ended on Monday at T$29, recovered from a post-
 crash low of T$25.3 but still below the last, pre-crash close of
 T$31.2 and far below the 1998 high of T$47.60.
     China Airlines' nine remaining Airbus A300-600s, grounded for
 safety checks after the crash, were still out of operation even
 though four had been given clean bills of health.
     The airline said they would not fly until all of the planes'
 pilots had taken refresher courses.
     China Airlines has had 12 crashes since 1969.  The last two,
 including the Feb. 16 crash, were catastrophic and both involved
 Airbus A300-600R passenger jets.
     In a similar crash in 1994, a nearly identical China Airlines
 A300-600R exploded and disintegrated while attempting to land at
 Nagoya, Japan, killing 264.
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 London, Feb. 23 - British Airways today said it had invited Boeing
 Co. and its arch rival Airbus Industrie to bid to replace BA's
 European aircraft fleet with up to 100 short-haul jets, worth up
 to $3.3 billion.
     But the airline has challenged the two manufacturers to come up
 with new ways of financing the deal, to help BA reduce its own
 capital commitments.
     "A new fleet is needed. We will be looking for proposals which
 will help to drive down operating and maintenance costs, provide
 better asset utilisation and allow us to meet new noise regulations,"
 chief executive Robert Ayling said.
     "We are looking at anything for innovative proposals, so we can
 solve some of the problems we have. "We are currently acquiring too
 many capital assets and liabilities and ideally we would like to re-
 duce that over the course of the next few years ... I think we are
 in a strong position to do this because of the strength of our
 business."
     The airline said the competition is between Boeing's 737 series
 aircraft and the Airbus A320 family.
                      30 Aircraft at First
    BA is seeking an initial order of up to 30 aircraft worth between
 $244 million and $366 million for its BA Regional (BAR) division,
 which operates services out of Birmingham and Manchester.
     First deliveries are due in September 1999 but BA said it would
 want a total of about 100 jets of the same type over the next decade
 to gradually replace seven older, noisier aircraft types in service
 with BA Regional, its French carrier Air Liberte, Deutsche BA and
 its London EuroGatwick operation.
    "One of the advantages of being able to re-equip at this magnitude
 is that we can introduce a single aircraft type which will reduce
 engineering and maintenance and operating costs," Ayling said.
     He said he expected to pick the winning manufacturer "before the
 summer."
      A win by Airbus would give the European consortium its first
 ever order from BA, which currently operates only 10 Airbus A320s
 inherited from its takeover of British Caledonian airways.
                     Does Boeing Have an "In?"
 But Ayling denied that Boeing was the favorite, despite the fact that
 Boeing aircraft account for over 80 percent of its current fleet of
 some 300 jet aircraft. Recent orders made for Boeing 737s for Deut-
 sche BA and BA Regional were for short-term leases, he said.
  "We have invited tenders from both manufacturers," he told Reuters.
 "They both have aircraft which are able to satisfy our requirements.
 We will be looking at the operating performance of the aircraft and.
 ..the terms on which they are offered."
     BA has given Boeing and Airbus until March 16 to complete their
 initial tenders - and to prove their inventiveness for proposals on
 financing the deal.
      Ayling said he wants to cut BA's capital exposure and believes
 operating leases are not the only way an airline might reduce capital
 expenditure on its aircraft.
     "Operating leases are very conventional," he told Reuters in an
 interview after the announcement. "What we are looking for is long-
 term use of the aircraft, taking as little of the long-term capital
 risk and liability as we can possibly manage," he said.
     At the end of 1997 BA's net borrowings stood at 3.96 billion
 pounds and net assets at 3.38 billion pounds.
     Airbus comprises Aerospatiale of France, British Aerospace Plc,
 Daimler-Benz Aerospace, a unit of Daimler-Benz AG and Construcciones
 Aeronauticas SA (CASA) of Spain.
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