22 die in IAF plane crash
Tribune News Service

NEW DELHI, March 7 — On a day when the Indian Air Force was flexing its muscles at the "Vayushakti-99" display at the Pokhran deserts, 22 persons including 19 men from the force were killed when an AN-32 transport aircraft crashed near the Indira Gandhi International Airport this morning.

While all 19 persons on board, including the four-member crew, were killed, a woman and two children were burnt to death on the ground and at least seven persons sustained injuries when their hutments were hit by the burning fuselage of the aircraft.

The crash occurred just about 25 minutes after the Boeing carrying Defence Minister George Fernandes Information and Broadcasting Minister Pramod Mahajan and other dignitaries, including Members of Parliament and senior officials of the government took off from the IGI airport for the Vayushakti show at Pokhran. The Defence Minister’s plane was the last to take off from the IGI airport in the IAF movement for Pokhran.

IAF officials said the aircraft being flown by Flt Lt Mohit Abrol, was carrying 19 IAF personnel and the deceased include 10 officers, four of them Wing Commanders. The others who perished in the crash were two Junior Warrant Officers, three Sergeants and three Corporals.

The plane, which took off from Agra with 10 persons on board, including four flight crew members, picked up eight more persons from Gwalior.

The transport aircraft from Gwalior was given clearance to land by Air Traffic Control (ATC) at 8.12 am. However, it suddenly vanished from the radar screen and crashed at 8.25 am in Pappankalan area of South-West Delhi.

An all-out alert was sounded and the fire brigade, police and Air Force personnel rushed to the site. The airport was closed to traffic and all incoming flights were diverted and outgoing ones were cancelled.

The ill-fated AN-32 aircraft first hit the walls of an open dry nullah, then an electric pole snapping overhead wires, hit the compound wall of the complex containing three large command water tanks.

The Russian built transport aircraft immediately burst into flames, filling the whole area with thick black smoke. Eyewitnesses said it was only after the smoke cleared did they realise that a plane had crashed.

The aircraft had crashed 3 km short of the touchdown point on the runway.

A court of enquiry has been ordered, which would be conducted by Air Cdr Kumar based at Chandigarh. An IAF officer said there was a likelihood of engine failure having led to the crash.

A large crowd had gathered at the crash site and Delhi Police personnel had a difficult time keeping the curious onlookers at bay. The front portion of the aircraft had telescoped into a concrete structure and parts of the wreckage lay strewn in an area of about 400 metres.

The mishap took place at Pappankalan which is a fast-developing residential area near the IGI airport.

"I heard a very loud sound and soon the entire area was full of thick smoke," said 38-year-old Phulwani, a labourer who lost two children Alka (12), and Krishna (7), when the burning fuselage hit her hutment nearby in Pappankalan.

A sobbing Phulwani said she was working in a nearby field when the mishap occurred.

A dazed Jasrooh said he had lost his mother Joythin in the blaze as his hut had caught fire. "My son is also seriously injured," he said.

Among those injured were a boy and a five-year-old girl who received 35 per cent burns. The injured were rushed to the Deen Dayal Upadhyay hospital where some of them were discharged after first aid.

The casualty could have been higher had the construction workers been at work, the eyewitnesses said, adding that workers were not at the construction site as they were waiting for raw material from a nearby godown.

This is the second plane crash in the country within 48 hours. An Air France cargo freighter, Boeing 747, burst into flames and was reduced to ashes at Chennai airport yesterday. All the five crew members had survived.
The accident site was a chaotic jumble of crumpled metal sheets, twisted wires and broken glasses. The tail section had fallen next to the water tank while the rest of the fuselage had spread over a large area with a major portion falling on the water tank itself.

The DCP (South West), Mr P.K. Bharadwaj, who was at the accident site supervising the operations, said the mishap occurred at about 8.22 am. "By 8.40 a.m. police control vans were rushed and six injured were rescued from the area," he said.

He said 25 fire tenders were pressed into service to douse the flames after which 19 bodies were extricated from the wreckage. While 16 bodies were found in the first round of rescue operations, three more bodies were recovered in the subsequent searches.

Meanwhile, Indian Airlines had redirected its flights coming to Delhi from Chennai, Mumbai, Calcutta and other destinations to their originating airports. Sahara and Jet Airways had also redirected their flights to Mumbai and other airports during the time the airport was closed.

Confusion prevailed at the airport as no announcement was made for the reason of the closure of the air traffic at IGI airport.

Stranded passengers were seen making frantic enquiries about the resumption of flights.

The IAF, the Airport Authority of India and Director General of Civil Aviation will hold separate inquiries into the mishap.

Retired Air Marshal Denzil Keeler blamed the construction activity around the airport as a contributory factor for the crash. He said aircraft faced difficulty while approaching the runway because of the construction activity of multi-storeyed buildings in the vicinity of the airport.

An IAF officer said the wheels of the AN-32 were down, ready for landing and the aircraft was in line with the runway 1028 when the mishap occurred.
He observed that the cockpit voice recorder would throw crucial light on the final moments before the aircraft disappeared from the radar screen.

Pilot error likely
Tribune News Service

NEW DELHI, March 7 — The possibility of the pilot having made an error while making the descent is one of the lines of investigation being taken up by the "court of inquiry", set up to look into the apparent cause of the IAF AN-32 transport plane crash, say Indian Air Force sources.

IAF sources said the pilot of the ill-fated AN-32 transport aircraft which crashed about 2 km from the Indira Gandhi International Airport could have miscalculated the descent leading to the aircraft ploughing into the water tank after snapping overhead wires.

Although the IAF officials were tight-lipped and not ready to make comments, the sources say by the time the pilot could have possibly realised that there had been a mistake in calculation, it would have been too late to make any necessary corrections. The IAF officials however said the plane had hit the cables after descending to a lower than required height, apparently due to poor visibility.

The sources point out that at about 8.12 am, the Air Traffic Controller spoke to the pilot and the pilot did not mention anything about engine problems or other technical hiccups.

Since the Russian built AN-32 has proved to be a dependable aircraft and is not known to develop serious technical problems during the years that it has been in operation with the IAF, the possibility of such a thing happening during this flight is also feeble, the sources say.

However, the possibility of engine failure when the aircraft had already begun to descent cannot be ruled out and the preliminary investigations are also looking into this technical aspect.

The black box which contains crucial information just before the crash took place has been found at the site.

The lucky ones
Tribune News Service

NEW DELHI, March 7 — This morning, was a usual grind for construction worker Pradhan Singh at Papam Kalan village near here. Little did he realise what he would witness.

By forenoon, Pradhan Singh (22) was convinced that his youth was yet to mingle with dust. He saw the Indian Air Force AN-32 heading straight towards his residence near a water tank.

"For a moment I could not believe what I was seeing. Somehow I gathered my senses and shouted "Run, Run". Even before many of us could react there was a deafening sound followed by a pall of smoke," says Pradhan Singh.

It was only after the smoke cleared did we realise that the aircraft had ploughed through the compound wall and hit the water tank, he added.

Had the course of the plane been even a few metres off, I would have surely been killed," said Pradhan Singh.

Mr Hawa Singh, Executive Engineer, Delhi Development Authority, had a special reason for being thankful to the Almighty.

He said there were three command tanks in the complex with two of them filled with about 8,000 gallons of water each. The aircraft hit the third tank which was under construction.

"I even dread to think what the situation would have been had the plane hit any of the water tanks filled with water. Not only the whole area would have been inundated, those standing close by could have been washed away by the force of gushing water," he said.

It was definitely providential escape for those IAF personnel who had to board the aircraft from Delhi.

The labourers, who were working at the water tank, were grateful for the delay caused by their contractor in providing them construction material on time.

Labourer Ram Sharan said: "I was supposed to be at work at the site, but there was delay due to lack of availability of ‘sariya’ (iron rods) so I had to wait near the godown. Then I heard this loud noise and ran to see that a plane had crashed in the area where I would have been working."

List of the dead
From Our Correspondent

NEW DELHI, March 7 — The following is the list of those killed in the AN-32 air crash.

Flight Lieutenant Mohit Abrol (captain); Flying Officer, T.B. Payguda (co-pilot); Flight Lieutenant, N. Chandra (navigator); Junior Warrant Officer D.K. Naik (Flight Engineer); Wing Commander Manjeet Singh Jaggi; Wing Commander D.K. Shukla; Wing Commander S.B. Angara; Squadron Leader, S.K. Mishra; Flight Lieutenant A. Sheikh, Flight Lieutenant D.K. Rajan; Flying Officer, Sajid; Junior Warrant Officer, Shukla, Sergeants R.P. Singh, R.N. Singh, and Srivastava; Corporals, Ishwar Chand, Noor Zaman and Siddiqui.

The civilian deaths Alka (12), Krishna (7) and Johitin (60).

March unlucky for AN-32
by Prabhjot Singh
Tribune News Service

CHANDIGARH, March 7 — The month of March continues to be unlucky for AN-32 aircraft of Indian Air Force. Of the seven major accidents in which these transport aircraft have been involved since 1986, four took place in March and one in April .

The first major air crash involving the AN-32 took place on March 22 in 1986 in Jammu and Kashmir area followed by another, three days later, when an AN-32 on its way to Jamnagar from Muscat was lost in the Arabian Sea. Its wreckage, in spite of best of efforts, could not be located.

The third accident involving the similar aircraft took place six years later. It was on March 25 in 1992 when an aircraft was lost in Jorhat hills. The worst of the accidents took place on April 1, 1992, when an AN 32 was involved in a mid-air collision near Khanna. It was in this accident that Wg Cdr Makol was among those killed.

In between, there have been two other accidents involving AN-32 aircraft. One of these probably took place in October, 1988, near Kanpur while the second occurred near Trivandrum during the monsoon either in 1991 or 1992. The ill-fated aircraft in the last mentioned case had taken off from Tambaram.

The latest accident, which took place this morning at Indira Gandhi International Airport, was perhaps the worst in which 2 people, including several officers were killed.

Air Commodore RV Kumar, who was until recently here as Station Commander and was in town for the past couple of days to participate in the raising day celebrations of 25 Squadron, will conduct the Court of Enquiry.

The captain of the aircraft, Flt Lieutenant Abrol, who got married only last year, was among those killed. The ill-fated aircraft, according to the Air Traffic Controllers' Guild, was to land on runway one zero (10) but crashed around two miles away from the runway.

At about 8.20 a.m., the Air Traffic Controller at Delhi's ATC tower observed that an IAF AN 32 flight from Gwalior to Delhi had suddenly disappeared from the radar screen. the visibility at the airport at that time was reported to be about 500 metres only.

The aircraft, according to the Guild, was coming for an ILS aided landing on runway 10 of the IGI airport. The ATC, after noticing thedisappearance of the aircraft from the screen, promptly tried to contact the aircraft through all the available frequencies. "It is quite frequent for an IAF AN-32 aircraft to be missing from the radar due to transponder incompatibility," said an official spokesperson of the Guild.

The Guild maintained that all the laid down procedures were observed in the case of such situations. After failing to make contact with the aircraft, the ATC requisitioned a jeep to move towards runway 10 to check out whether the aircraft had landed or not.

The runway in use at that time of the accident was the 10 secondary runway. This was because the newly installed CATII ILS of the main runway was reportedly not functioning properly. "It has not been functioning ever since it was commissioned in mid-February this year," the spokesman observed.

The Guild further maintained that in January this year, one of the components of the ILS system had failed when an Austrian Airlines Airbus 310 was preparing to land on runway 28 — the opposite runway of runway 10 — of IGI airport in foggy conditions. The ATCOs on duty at the new ATS complex never knew of the failure of this critical component but fortunately the Austrian aircraft got away with only a 'bad' approach.

"The Guild would also like to place on record that on February 21 this year, an Air India flight 5110 had gone off radar control because of the communication systems failure at the airport in Delhi," the Guild spokesperson said.