Passenger Plane Crash with 152 People In Pakistan

A passenger jet carrying 152 people crashed into the hills surrounding Pakistan's capital amid rain Wednesday, officials said. At least five people were killed and five wounded, but many more were feared dead.

The cause of the Airblue crash was not immediately clear, said Pervez George, a civil aviation official. He said the plane had left the southern city of Karachi at 7:45 a.m. for a two-hour scheduled flight to Islamabad and was trying to land during difficult weather. Airblue is a private service based in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city.

"The plane was about to land at the Islamabad airport when it lost contact with the control tower, and later we learned that the plane had crashed," George said, adding that the model of the plane was Airbus 321 and the flight number was ED202.

Guards with the forestry service said they had found some wreckage and seen at least five dead bodies, said Imtiaz Inayat Ali, an official with Islamabad's Capital Development Authority. Federal Interior Minister Rehman Malik said at least five wounded passengers had been rescued.

Pakistani news channels showed what appeared to be wreckage of the plane as a helicopter hovered above the heavily forested hills to assess the situation. Fire was visible and smoke was blowing up from the scene. The army said it was sending special troops to the area to help out along with helicopters.

At the Islamabad airport, hundreds of friends and relatives of those on board the flight swarmed ticket counters desperately seeking information. A large cluster of people also surrounded the list of passengers on the flight, which was posted near the Airblue ticket counter.

"Nobody is guiding anyone. People are running from one counter to another," said Arshad Mahmood, whose brother, Maulana Nawab Ulhasan, a prayer leader in a town near Islamabad, was on the flight.

"I'm praying for his survival, but I think there is little hope," Mahmood said.

Arshad Ali said his cousin, Raza Ali, was supposed to be on the flight but missed it in Karachi on his way from Canada.

"We are happy he missed the flight, but things here are in shambles at the airport," Ali said. "For God's sake, take care of the worried people, the relatives of those who were on the unfortunate plane. They have no information and are just running here and there."

Saqlain Altaf told Pakistan's ARY news channel that he was on a family outing in the hills when he saw the plane looking unsteady in the air. "The plane had lost balance, and then we saw it going down," he said, adding that he heard the crash.

Officials at first thought it was a small plane, but later revised that. George said 146 passengers were on the flight along with six crew members.

Raheel Ahmed, a spokesman for the airline, said an investigation would be launched, but that for now the focus was to find survivors. The plane was no more than eight years old, and it had no known technical issues, Ahmed said. He added that to his knowledge, the pilots had not sent any emergency signals.

Airblue flies within Pakistan as well as internationally to the United Arab Emirates, Oman and the United Kingdom.

The only previous recorded accident for Airblue, a carrier that began flying in 2004, was a tailstrike in May 2008 at Quetta airport by one of the airline's Airbus 321 jets. There were no casualties and damage was minimal, according to the U.S.-based Aviation Safety Network.

The Airbus 320 family of medium-range jets, which includes the 321 model that crashed Wednesday, is one of the most popular in the world, with about 4,000 jets delivered since deliveries began in 1988.

Twenty-one of the aircraft have been lost in accidents since then, according to the Aviation Safety Network's database. The deadliest was a 2007 crash at landing in Sao Paolo by Brazil's TAM airline, in which all 187 people on board perished, along with 12 others on the ground.

The last major plane crash in Pakistan was in July 2006 when a Fokker F-27 twin-engine aircraft operated by Pakistan International Airlines slammed into a wheat field on the outskirts of the central Pakistani city of Multan, killing all 45 people on board.

In August 1989, another PIA Fokker, with 54 people onboard, went down in northern Pakistan on a domestic flight. The plane's wreckage was never found.

In September 1992, a PIA Airbus A300 crashed into a mountain in Nepal, killing all 167 people on board. Investigators found the plane was flying 1,500 feet lower than it reported as it approached the Katmandu airport.

Air India Aircraft Overshoots Runway, 159 Feared Dead

An Air India flight from Dubai carrying 166 people crashed into a heavily wooded valley moments after landing at an airport in southern India on Saturday morning, killing almost everyone on board.

Firefighters performed rescue operations as people crowd around an Air India plane that crashed in Mangalore on Saturday.

Indian firefighters carried a child, reportedly a survivor, out of the debris of an Air India plane that crashed in Mangalore on Saturday.
The plane overshot the hilltop runway where it was landing in one of India’s trickiest airports, in the city of Mangalore, which sits in the Western Ghats, or hills, on India’s southwestern coast.
Aviation officials said that the pilot of the Boeing 737 missed the landing threshold, a critical portion of the runway at airports where runways are shorter because of hilly terrain, by as much as 2,000 feet. The plane veered off the runway and struck a concrete navigational aid called a localizer, according to Praful Patel, India’s aviation minister.


“The wing fell of and the aircraft plunged into the valley,” Mr. Patel told reporters at a news conference.
Seven people survived the crash, according to the financially troubled airline, which is owned and operated by the Indian government.
“As soon as we landed, the tire burst,” one of the survivors told a local television crew from his hospital bed. “Within three seconds there was a fire blast. The inside was filled with smoke.”
He said he escaped through a crack in the fuselage.

Aviation officials said that the weather was clear, with six kilometers of visibility, and no rain. The plane’s pilot had landed the same aircraft on the Mangalore runway 19 times before. And while the runway is shorter than others in major Indian airports, it was more than adequate for landing a Boeing 737, aviation safety experts said.
The flight is popular with migrants from southern India, millions of whom work as laborers in construction sites in the Persian Gulf.


Rescue workers scrambled over the smoldering crash site, looking for more survivors among the charred remains, but there was little hope of finding anyone else alive.
The crash, at an airport with a short runway built on a plateau and surrounded by cliffs, is likely to renew debate about safety standards in India’s rapidly expanding aviation sector. Some Indian aviation safety experts have expressed increasing concern in the last couple of years about the country’s airlines, airports and regulations. Last year, there were three near-miss collisions between planes at the airport in Mumbai, the country’s commercial capital.
Air India, in particular, has been in the news for a number of embarrassing incidents, including a midair scuffle between pilots and flight attendants during which the plane was reportedly unmanned for a few minutes. In September, an Air India flight to Toronto was delayed 11 hours while staff searched for rats that had climbed aboard the plane.

As investigators rushed to the smoldering wreckage, experts said the unusual configuration of the runway made landing there complicated.
Kapil Kaul, the chief executive of India and the Middle East at the Center for Asia Pacific Aviation, a research group, said pilot error was a likely cause. The pilot had 7,500 hours of flying experience, 3,500 of which were on this type of plane, Mr. Kaul said. But he may have missed the landing threshold, which is the very first part of a runway usable for landing, he said. That kind of error doesn’t always result in a crash, but did at the Mangalore Airport because it is on a plateau.
The plane, a Boeing 737-800, was relatively new, having made its first flight in December 2007, according to the Aviation Safety Network.
The 737-800 has been involved in five fatal accidents since entering service in 1998. The most recent was in January, an Ethiopian Airlines flight to Addis Ababa that crashed into the Mediterranean Sea in stormy weather shortly after takeoff from Beirut, killing 90 people. The cause of that accident remains under investigation.


In February 2009, nine people died when a Boeing 737-800 operated by Turkish Airlines crashed on approach near Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. Dutch investigators identified a faulty altimeter, which caused the plane to slow down too abruptly and stall at an altitude of around 2,000 feet.
Sanat Kaul, a former aviation ministry official and a former member of Air India’s board of directors, said the runway at Mangalore airport sits on a plateau and was extended to 8,000 feet, from 5,500 feet in 2006 to better accommodate bigger planes like the 737.
“Mangalore is a difficult field because it is on a plateau,” he said. “From all accounts the visibility was all right. One can’t make any conclusions. The runway was extended to 8,000 feet in 2006. That is all right for landing” a 737.
The airline said 160 passengers were on board, four of them infants, along with six crewmembers.
Air India, which is owned and run by the Indian government, has been struggling since a 2007 merger with another state carrier, and lost $1.2 billion in the last fiscal year. Competition from new private airlines like Kingfisher and Jet Airways is luring away customers, and the company is focusing on cutting costs by trimming staff and routes.


Many safety consultants blame the government for weak policies and spotty enforcement.
“Aviation safety is a potent subject in America while it is an impotent one in India,” A. Ranganathan, a former pilot and safety consultant, wrote in The Hindu newspaper late last year. “We are impotent because we have an ineffective hierarchy — ministry, legislators and regulator — controlling aviation.”
If most of the passengers have been killed, as is feared, this would be the worst airline disaster in India since 1996, when an Air Kazakhstan flight collided with a Saudi Arabia Airlines flight in midair above Delhi airport, killing 312 people.
The last major airline accident in India was in 2000, when an Alliance Air Boeing 737 plane crashed into a neighborhood while trying to land at an airport in Patna, killing about 60 people.


Credit: NY Times