South Asia News

159 killed in India plane crash (3rd Roundup)

May 22, 2010, 16:28 GMT

Rescue work being undertaken as charred bodies are seen trapped at the site of the Air India plane crash in Mangalore around 360 Km form southern Indian city of Bangalore on, 22 May 2010. EPA/JAGADEESH NV

New Delhi - At least 159 people were killed Saturday when Air India Express flight 812 from Dubai overshot the runway at the south-western Indian city of Mangalore, officials said.

Air India Express flight 812 from Dubai, with 160 passengers and six crew members, overshot the tricky hilltop runway while landing in Mangalore and crashed into a forested gorge, airport officials and eyewitnesses said.

The aircraft broke into pieces and caught fire. Eight passengers, who managed to jump out, survived. But one of them, a 4-year-old girl, later succumbed to injuries in a hospital.

Bodies of 158 victims had been recovered from the wreckage site, a top police official said.

With all passengers accounted for, rescue workers ended search operations.

'Of the 158 bodies, 72 bodies have been identified,' Mangalore's commissioner of police Seemanth Kumar Singh said.

'Many of the bodies are badly burned and charred,' federal Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel said earlier at a briefing in Mangalore. 'It will take some time to identify them and hand them over to their kith and kin.'

Patel also said it was too early to say what caused the accident. He said the entire wreckage of the plane had been found and the black box was also expected to be recovered.

Patel said the two-and-a-half year-old aircraft had no history of defects or malfunction and that weather conditions were relatively normal when it landed.

Though it had been raining in the region since Thursday, there was no rain and the runway was dry when the aircraft landed, Patel said.

The commander of the aircraft, Z Glusica - a British national of Serbian origin - had 10,200 hours of flying experience and had flown planes at least 19 times to the Mangalore airport, the minister said.

Patel said a wing of the aircraft appeared to have hit an instrument at the end of the runway, after which it veered off and fell 200 to 300 feet into the adjoining valley.

The airport on the outskirts of Mangalore is located in a hilly area. Landings and take-offs from its 2,450-metre runway have little overshoot area and are considered difficult, according to aviation experts.

Patel acknowledged that there was very little spillover space along the runway - about 900 metres of sandy surface - but pointed out that the runway had been operational without any mishap since 2006.

India's Directorate General of Civil Aviation had ordered an enquiry and Air India had put together a team of experts to investigate the accident, Patel said.

'The aircraft touched down (on) the runway 24 slightly beyond the touchdown zone, overshot the runway and went in the valley beyond the runway,' a federal Civil Aviation Ministry release said.

All the passengers were Indian nationals, Air India's director of personnel, Anup Srivastava, said. The passengers included 105 men, 36 women and 19 children, four of them infants. All the crew members died in the crash.

Firefighters took over four hours to douse the blazing aircraft.

Mangled parts of the plane were spread over a two-kilometre-radius of forested hillocks. Fifteen teams of rescue workers were engaged for hours searching for survivors and victims.

All the survivors had jumped from the aircraft immediately after it went off the runway. They escaped through gaping holes and broken windows as the aircraft cracked into pieces.

While three were injured seriously, three had minor injuries and one miraculously escaped without any injury, officials said.

'A crack appeared on the plane's body where I was seated,' Ummer Farooq told the NDTV news channel from his hospital bed. 'I immediately jumped out ... As I fled from the aircraft, flames engulfed it.'

Most of the crash victims hailed from the southern states of Kerala and Karnataka and were workers returning home from the Gulf region for summer holidays.

It was the first major aircraft accident in India since an Alliance Air Boeing 737 crashed into a residential area near the eastern city of Patna on July 17, 2000, killing 61 people.

Air India Express is a low-cost wing of state-owned Air India.

India's worst aviation accident was on November 12, 1996, when 349 people were killed in a mid-air collision of a Saudi Arabian Airlines plane and a Kazakhastan Airlines plane over northern India.

Civil Aviation Secretary M M Nambiar said Air India will be running a special flight from Dubai to bring relatives of those who were killed in the crash.

Patel, meanwhile, briefed Prime Minister Manmohan Singh after returning to Delhi and took responsibility for the incident.