Flight SQ006, a Boeing 747-400 bound for Los Angeles with 179 people aboard, made a wrong turn onto a partially closed runway as a typhoon approached. The plane hit construction equipment just as its wheels were leaving the ground, causing the jet to slam onto the runway, slide nearly a mile and burst into flames.

The accident killed 83 people and injured 71 more, many with serious burns. Only 25 people escaped unscathed.

The Taiwanese government's Aviation Safety Council declared in a report released here today that main cause of the crash lay in a series of mistakes by the flight's crew, although the report also acknowledged inadequate signage and lighting at the airport and a slow response by the airport's fire and medical crews. Singapore's Ministry of Transport blamed the crash almost entirely on Chiang Kai Shek International Airport here, accusing it of doing too little to warn pilots that the runway was under repair.

Runway safety has become a top issue in aviation as air travel steadily expands but few new airports are built, so that airfields are increasingly congested. The crash here, which occurred on Oct 31, 2000, was followed by a runway collision between two planes in Milan on Oct 8, 2001. The Italian crash was even deadlier, killing 122.

In the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration has made runway safety a top priority.

On the night that Flight SQ006 crashed, the wind was blowing 55 miles an hour and rain was falling at the rate of nearly an inch an hour because of an approaching typhoon, according to the Taiwanese report. The plane left the gate, taxied to the end of the airfield and made a right turn.

The plane was then supposed to travel 300 yards and turn right onto the main runway, named Runway 05L. Instead, the plane taxied less than half that distance and turned right onto the parallel, somewhat narrower Runway 05R.

Runway 05R was 9000 feet long. The airport had been repaving a short segment in the middle, and planned to designate the whole runway as a taxiway as soon as new signage arrived from the United States. Barriers had been erected close to the middle segment to discourage pilots from going there. But both ends of the runway leading to the middle segment were being used as taxiways to prevent traffic jams of airplanes, as permitted by international rules, said Kay Yong, the chief Taiwanese crash investigator.

Runway 05R still had bright lights down the middle of it, although they had been covered with green filters to make them look like the green lights of a taxiway instead of the white lights of a runway, both reports said. And while international regulations required that there be 16 lights leading past Runway 05R to the next, correct runway, only four lights had been installed and two of these were not working properly, both reports said.

Dr Cheong Choong Kong, the chief executive and deputy chairman of Singapore Airlines, which is 55-percent owned by the government of Singapore, attributed the crash to poor airport facilities. "We believe that these deficiencies misled the pilots into taking off from the wrong runway," he said.

Mr Yong disagreed, saying that mistakes by the airport, "did not lead the pilot onto the wrong runway." He accused the flight crew of hurrying to take off before the storm could worsen.

Unlike many countries, Taiwan allows manslaughter prosecutions against defendants who play any role at all in a death. Taiwanese prosecutors have an open investigation into the crash, which has been an emotional issue here because many of the victims were Taiwanese. Paul McCarthy, the principal vice president for technical standards at the International Federation of Airline Pilots' Associations, said the group was worried that Taiwan might take the rare step of prosecuting the Singapore Airlines pilots for negligence.

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