A preliminary report on the Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) plane crash, in which 97 people were killed, has raised serious questions
Karachi: A preliminary report on the Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) plane crash, in which 97 people were killed, has raised serious questions about the pilot’s handling of the aircraft.
According to the report, prepared by the country’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), the Airbus A-320’s engines had scraped the runway thrice on the pilot’s first attempt to land, causing friction and sparks recorded by the experts.
PhotoAfter the third impact, the pilot took the aircraft off into the air again, which officials found very strange as the crew in the cockpit did not inform the Air Traffic Control (ATC) at the Jinnah International Airport of any problem with the landing gear.
When the aircraft scraped the ground on the first failed attempt at landing, the engine’s oil tank and fuel pump may have been damaged and started to leak, preventing the pilot from achieving the required thrust and speed to raise the aircraft to safety, the report said.
The pilot made a decision “on his own” to undertake a “go-around” after he failed to land the first time. It was only during the go-around that the ATC was informed that landing gear was not deploying, it said.
PhotoExperts said that the failure to achieve the directed height indicates that the engines were not responding. The aircraft, thereafter, tilted and crashed suddenly.
“The plane descended too fast, almost plunged,” sources familiar with the report said.
The investigators were trying to establish why the pilots not once informed the ATC of any emergency, malfunction, engine failure or fire despite the visible problems the aircraft was facing, the report said, adding that it is rare to have so many technical problems at the same time.
The ATC’s conduct is also being probed. The report added that at this point, there are more questions than answers with the most serious being why and how the alarm systems inside the cockpit failed to warn the pilots of an impending emergency.
PhotoPIA chief executive officer Arshad Malik has said that the black box of the plane has been handed over to the investigation team.
The team, headed by Air Commodore Muhammad Usman Ghani, President of the Aircraft Accident and Investigation Board, is expected to submit a full report in about three months.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Pakistan government had allowed the limited domestic flight operations from five major airports Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar and Quetta from May 16.
After the plane tragedy, the PIA has called off its domestic operation.
