A Taiwan flight with 58 people turned on its side in midair, clipped an elevated roadway and careened into a river Wednesday shortly after takeoff from the island's capital of Taipei, killing at least 3 people, local media and officials said.

The death toll in the TransAsia Airways flight was expected to rise as rescue crews cleared the mostly sunken fuselage in the Keelung River a couple dozen meters (yards) from the shore. Teams of rescuers in rubber rafts clustered around the wreckage.

The ATR 72 prop-jet aircraft was flying on its side, with one wing scraping past Taiwan's National Freeway No 1 just seconds before it plunged into the river, local television images showed. It was the airline's second French-Italian-built ATR 72 to crash in the past year.

Wednesday's flight had taken off from Taipei's downtown Sungshan Airport en route to the outlying Taiwan-controlled Kinmen islands.

Civil aviation officials said the flight took off at 10:53 am and lost contact with controllers two minutes later. Thirty-one passengers were from Chinese mainland, Taiwan's tourism bureau said. Kinmen's airport is a common link between Taipei and Chinese mainland's Fujian province.

Wu Jun-hong, a Taipei Fire Department official who was coordinating the rescue, said the missing people were still in the fuselage or had been pulled downriver, he said.

The plane's wing also hit a taxi, the driver of which was injured, on the freeway just before it crashed into the river, Taiwanese broadcaster TVBS reported.

Last July, 48 people were killed when a 70-seat ATR 72 turboprop plane of TransAsia Airways crashed near the runway while trying to land on the small island of Penghu, west of Taiwan island, following a typhoon earlier in the day.