TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) — One of the engines on TransAsia Airways Flight 235 went idle 37 seconds after takeoff, and the pilots may have shut off the remaining engine before attempting to restart them, but the plane crashed before that could happen, Taiwan's top aviation safety official said Friday. 
 
 Search and rescue divers carry a recovered body at the site of a commercial plane crash in Taipei, Taiwan, Friday, Feb. 6, 2015. TransAsia Airways Flight 235 with 58 people aboard clipped a bridge shortly... (Associated Press) 
 
 Relatives from mainland China react as they watch divers recover bodies at the site of a commercial plane crash in Taipei, Taiwan, Friday, Feb. 6, 2015. TransAsia Airways Flight 235 clipped a bridge shortly... (Associated Press) 
 
 Search and rescue divers continue to search for missing persons at the site of a commercial plane crash in Taipei, Taiwan, Friday, Feb. 6, 2015. TransAsia Airways Flight 235, with 58 people aboard, clipped... (Associated Press) 
 
 The details were presented at a news conference in Taipei by Aviation Safety Council Executive Director Thomas Wang as preliminary findings from the flight data recorder. 
 
 Wednesday's crash into a river in Taipei minutes after takeoff killed at least 35 people and left eight missing. Fifteen people were rescued with injuries after the accident, which was captured in a dramatic dashboard camera video that showed the ATR 72 propjet banking steeply and scraping a highway overpass before it hurtled into the Keelung River. 
 
 Wang said the plane's right engine triggered an alarm 37 seconds after takeoff. However, he said the data showed it had not shut down, or "flamed out" as the pilot told the control tower, but rather moved into idle mode, with no change in the oil pressure. 
 
 Then, 46 seconds later, the left engine was shut down, apparently by one of the pilots, so that neither engine was producing any power. A restart was attempted, but the plane crashed just 72 seconds later. 
 
 Wang said it was too early to draw firm conclusions about the reasons why the engines ceased producing power. 
 
 "It's only the third day so we can't say too much," Wang said. "We haven't ruled anything out." 
 
 Taiwanese Vice President Wu Den-yih, mindful of the island's reputation as a tourist destination and its tense relations with China where most of the flight's passengers were from, went to a Taipei funeral parlor for prayer sessions to pay respects. 
 
 At the parlor, where bodies are being stored, Wu expressed condolences and praised pilot Liao Chien-chung, who died in the crash. The pilots may have deliberately steered the plane away from buildings and into the river in the final moments. 
 
 "When it came to when it was clear his life would end, (the pilot) meticulously grasped the flight operating system and in the final moments he still wanted to control the plane to avoid harming residents in the housing communities," Wu said. 
 
 "To the plane's crew, the victims ... I here express condolences." 
 
 Divers with a local fire agency found one female and three male bodies Friday along the muddy Keelung River bottom about 50 meters (yards) from the crash site, a Taipei City Fire Department official surnamed Chen said. 
 
 The agency suspects the eight bodies that are still missing may be in equally murky areas and has sent 190 divers to look for them. Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense dispatched three S-70C rescue helicopters to search along a river system that runs into the ocean off Taiwan's northwest coast. 
 
 More than 30 relatives of victims cried wildly, prayed or were comforted by Buddhist volunteers at the riverside crash site as divers in black wetsuits brought back the four bodies. Some divers came ashore with their hands joined in prayer for the people they brought back. 
 
 The pilot's and co-pilot's bodies were found earlier with their hands still on the controls, Taiwan's ETToday online news service said. 
 
 Wang said the cockpit flight recorder was still being analyzed and a transcript would be provided as soon as possible. 
 
 Investigators are to issue a preliminary report on the crash within 30 days and a fuller report within 3-4 months. A final draft will be submitted within 8 months and the full investigation concluded in about a year, Wang said. 
 
 He said the engines had shown no problems before the flight and repeatedly stated that the plane would have been able to take off and fly even with only one engine working. 
 
 Earl Chapman of Canada's Transportation Safety Bureau told the news conference that the plane's Pratt & Whitney engines were known for their reliability. 
 
 "This engine type has millions of flight hours behind it with a very good safety record. So it's fairly unremarkable in that respect," said Chapman, who was participating in the investigation because the engines were made by Pratt & Whitney's Canadian division. 
 
 The same airline operated another ATR 72 propjet that crashed on an outlying Taiwanese-controlled island last July 23, killing 48. 
 
 Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou's office said Thursday it was worried that air crashes would damage the island's reputation as a tourist destination. 
 
 Thirty-one of the passengers on Flight 235 were from China. Tourists from the mainland to Taiwan rose from a trickle before mid-2008 to a cumulative total of 9.7 million as of last year. 
 
 China has claimed sovereignty over Taiwan since a civil war in the 1940s, chilling relations until Ma took office in 2008 and opened dialogue that led to an agreement allowing tourist visits. 
 
 Tourists from China have also died in a construction site accident. A bus crash three years ago in eastern Taiwan injured 34. 
 
 The vice president's visit to the funeral home may be a "gesture to keep up benign relations," said Alexander Huang, strategic studies professor at Tamkang University in Taiwan. 
 
 As both sides handle the crash aftermath, a Chinese government minister in charge of Taiwan affairs postponed a visit scheduled for Saturday and Sunday. 
 
 The two sides also need more time to discuss four new domestic flight routes that China declared on its own last month, Taiwan's China policymaking body said in a statement. Taiwan opposes the new Taiwan Strait air routes, saying they could cause safety problems for its own domestic flights. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Bodeen reported from Beijing. Associated Press writer Ian Mader in Beijing and photographer Wally Santana and video journalists Johnson Lai and Tassanee Vejpongsa in Taipei contributed to this report. ||||| TAIPEI The crew of a twin-propellor TransAsia plane which crashed into a river in Taipei killing 35 people had lost power in one engine but shut down and restarted the other, investigators said on Friday. 
 
 The reason for the pilots' action was unclear but a combined lack of thrust caused the almost-new turboprop ATR 72-600 to stall soon after take-off, Aviation Safety Council officials said after a preliminary study of 'black box' flight recorders. 
 
 The plane, which can fly on one engine, was carrying 58 passengers and crew when it lurched nose-up between buildings, clipped an overpass and a taxi with one of its wings and then crashed upside down into a shallow river on Wednesday. Fifteen people survived. 
 
 The cockpit data and voice recorders showed that the plane warned five times of stalling before the crash in the center of Taipei, according to findings by the council. 
 
 The right engine entered a state called "auto-feather", in which it reduced thrust to the propeller, Thomas Wang, managing director of the council, told a news briefing. 
 
 The flight crew then reduced power to the left engine, turned it off and attempted to restart it, but it did not gain enough thrust. 
 
 There was no word on what may have been going through the pilots' minds or what the instruments may have been telling them, but evidence presented so far will raise questions over whether they accidentally cut the wrong engine. 
 
 "That happens, but it is rare," said Paul Hayes, safety director at British aviation consultancy Ascend Flightglobal. 
 
 In 1989, a British Midlands Boeing 737 jet crashed in central England after the crew shut down the wrong engine. Investigators said unfamiliar vibration and noise contributed to the so-called Kegworth disaster, in which 47 passengers died. 
 
 Taiwan said the TransAsia problems began shortly after the turboprop aircraft left Taipei's downtown Songshan airport. 
 
 "The first engine experienced a problem 37 seconds after take-off at 1,200 feet," Wang said. 
 
 He said the pilot had announced a "flameout", which can occur when fuel supply to an engine is interrupted or when there is faulty combustion, but that there had not been one according to the data. 
 
 "The flight crew stepped on the accelerator of engine 2 (righthand side)... The engine was still operating, but neither engine produced power." 
 
 PILOTS' EFFORT TO SAVE PLANE 
 
 The plane was powered by two PW127M engines made by Pratt & Whitney, part of United Technologies. 
 
 A fuller report on the crash will be available in next 30 days, with a final one expected in the next three to six months. For now, investigators cannot say exactly what caused the crash. 
 
 The pilot, 42-year-old Liao Chien-tsung, has been praised by Taipei's mayor for steering the plane between apartment blocks and commercial buildings before ditching the stalled aircraft in a river. [ID:nL4N0VF1DX} 
 
 The bodies of Liao and his co-pilot were retrieved from the cockpit, with their legs badly broken, investigators said. 
 
 "They were still trying to save this aircraft until the last minute," media quoted unidentified prosecutors involved in the crash investigation as saying. 
 
 Eight people are still missing. Aviation officials have said they have not given up hope of finding them. 
 
 The plane was bound for the Taiwan island of Kinmen. Among those on board were 31 tourists from China, mainly from the southwestern city of Xiamen. 
 
 Taiwan's aviation regulator has ordered TransAsia and Uni Air, a subsidiary of EVA Airways Corp, to conduct engine and fuel system checks on the remaining 22 ATR aircraft they still operate. 
 
 The crash was the latest in a string of Asian air disasters. 
 
 Indonesia has expanded its search for bodies of Indonesia AirAsia Flight QZ8501 that crashed into the Java Sea in December, killing all 162 people on board. 
 
 After a lull in search and recovery efforts, more bodies and wreckage have been found in the past few days off the coast of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. A total of 96 bodies have been found. 
 
 (Additional reporting by Faith Hung in Taipei, Cindy Silviana in Jakarta, Siva Govindasamy in Singapore and Tim Hepher in Paris; Writing by Nick Macfie; Editing by Robert Birsel and Toby Chopra)
– The pilot and co-pilot in the TransAsia crash died fighting to save the doomed plane, investigators say. Both men were found dead in the cockpit still gripping the controls, with badly broken legs, Reuters reports. At a press conference today, Taiwan's chief aviation safety official said both engines lost power before the plane crashed into a river on Wednesday, the AP reports. He said that 37 seconds after taking off, the ATR 72's right engine triggered an alarm, but instead of being the "flameout" the pilot announced, it had shifted to idle mode. The left engine was shut down manually 46 seconds later, he says. The pilot tried to restart both engines, but the plane crashed 72 seconds later. "During the flight's final moments, neither engine had any thrust," said the aviation official, who told reporters that it's too early to fully explain why neither engine had power. At a funeral parlor today, Taiwan's vice president praised the apparent heroism of the pilot in avoiding buildings just before the crash. "When it came to when it was clear his life would end," he said, the pilot "meticulously grasped the flight operating system and in the final moments he still wanted to control the plane to avoid harming residents in the housing communities." Divers recovered four more bodies today, bringing the death toll to 35, with eight still missing. The 15 survivors include a family that changed seats after the father was unsettled by a strange noise.