A Taiwanese plane carrying 58 commercial passengers plus crew veered sharply off path during take-off from the downtown Taipei airport on Wednesday. The TransAsia airplane crash-landed into a nearby river, killing 23 people and, Taipei officials say, leaving over 20 missing. The crash was caught on a dashboard camera. The events leading up to the crash are under investigation.

Witnesses watched from their cars or on the side of the river as the passenger plane jetted down through the sky into the water. They immediately jumped into the turbulent waters in attempt to assist in the rescue of passengers. “I saw a taxi, probably just metres ahead of me, being hit by one wing of the plane,” one witness recounts to a local news channel. Footage showed passengers donned in life jackets, stumbling and splashing in a disoriented state, trying to clear the river bank and wreckage to find land.

Survivors of the crash assisted emergency response teams in red inflatable rescue boats to search for the missing peoples still stuck underwater in the debris of the crash. The 15 people that were rescued with injuries miraculously lived through their TransAsia plane diving between apartment buildings and overtop a highway overpass. The plane crashed upside down in the shallow waters of the river after the port-side wing clipped a taxi.

Motorists posted photos on Twitter of the plane careening through the air over the highway moments after the turboprop ATR 72-600 aircraft took off. The weather appeared clear when the domestic Taiwanese flight began its route to the island of Kinmen.  TransAsia chief executive Chen Xinde was seen in a deep bow during a televised conference. He expressed his deepest sympathies to the passengers and crew that were aboard the crash-landed flight.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” a witness and rescuer described the most recent calamity in a disturbing collection of disasters to Asian airline carriers in the last 12 months. There is damage to the bridge behind him, along with parts of the plane scattered on the roadway and skid marks from a van forced to grind to a halt, barely missing the wing of the TransAsia plane as it fell. The last piece of communication received from the flight, recorded on an air traffic control site, was from the pilot: “Mayday Mayday engine flameout.”

In late December, an AirAsia plane flying to Singapore crashed after taking off from Indonesia. The full manifest of the plane was killed, totaling 162 deaths. A Malaysia Airlines jet was also lost last year near Australia. Just a few months later another Malaysia Airline plane lost control as it was attacked and went down over Ukraine. The combined loss of life for these events was 589 lives.