Air India Boeing 737 crash: Survivors say plane swayed violently

Survivors of a plane crash in India said the plane swayed violently as it approached a hilltop runway soaked by monsoon rain.

The return flight for Indians stranded abroad by the pandemic skidded off a runway in Southern India, nosedived and cracked in two, leaving 18 dead and more than 120 injured.

Civil aviation minister Hardeep S. Puri visited the crash site on Saturday and confirmed two black boxes, which record critical information about an aircraft, have been retrieved.

The dead included both pilots of the Air India Express flight, the airline said in a statement, adding that the four cabin crew were safe.

One of the two pilots who died in the crash, Deepak Sathe, was a former Air Force fighter pilot, reports said.

The two-year-old Boeing 737-800 flew from Dubai to Kozhikode, also called Calicut, in Kerala.

There were 174 adult passengers, 10 infants, two pilots and four cabin crew on board.

Kozhikode’s 2,850-metre runway is on a flat hilltop with deep gorges on either side.

The Air India Express flight was part of the Indian government’s special repatriation mission to bring Indian citizens back to the country, officials said.

Indian media quoted data from a flight tracker website showing that the aircraft appears to have attempted to land twice, with survivors telling local TV that the plane went up and down repeatedly before landing.

Rescue staff and locals hurried to the scene, desperately trying to free people from the wreckage in the dark and rain.

The flight was one of hundreds in recent months to bring home some of the tens of thousands of Indians stranded abroad by the coronavirus pandemic, many of them from Gulf countries to Kerala..

“My thoughts are with those who lost their loved ones. May the injured recover at the earliest … Authorities are at the spot, providing all assistance to the affected,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted his condolences.

Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri said he was “anguished and distressed” and that a formal enquiry would be conducted by accident investigators.

The last major plane crash in India was in 2010 when an Air India Express Boeing 737-800 from Dubai to Mangalore overshot the runway – again a tabletop landing surface – and burst into flames. The crash killed 158 people and left eight survivors.

India, which shut down all air travel in late March to try to contain the novel coronavirus, has restarted limited international air travel.

Source: Agencies

Image : Officials inspect the wreckage of an Air India Express jet at Calicut International Airport in Karipur, Kerala, on Aug 8, 2020. (Photo: AFP)

August 8 , 2020