The final report of the PIA plane crash could not be submitted even after 3 years

Karachi: Three years have passed since the accident of the ill-fated PIA plane that crashed near Jinnah International Airport, but the final report of the accident has not been submitted even after 3 years.

On May 22, 2020, 97 people including 8 crew members were killed in the PIA Flight PK 8303 crash on the afternoon of Jumat Al-Wadaa, the first flight that did not reach its destination after a two-month shutdown due to Covid restrictions. Most of the passengers in the flight were returning home on Eid-ul-Fitr.

PIA Flight PK 8303 took off from Lahore’s Allama Iqbal International Airport at 1:10 a.m. to Karachi’s Jinnah International Airport. The aircraft landed at Karachi Airport at 2:37 p.m. The captain of the plane took off to land again, but it crashed at Jinnah Garden, a residential area near the airport, just one kilometer from the runway.

The PIA plane that was suffering from disaster was 11 years old. When the plane reached the runway at 2:37 PM, the air traffic controller on duty sent a message to the captain of the plane, Sajjad Gul, that the height and speed of the plane was high, the plane was 1800 feet. Instead, it is at an altitude of 3000 thousand feet, to which the captain responds by controlling the altitude and speed.

Meanwhile, the aircraft touched down on the runway without landing gear. During the first landing, the aircraft continued to skid for several meters while sparks came out due to the engine hitting the runway. Due to the high speed, the pilot took off and hit the ground. Held, CCTV camera footage installed on the airport runway some time after the accident further revealed that the aircraft’s landing gear was not down when landing.

During the aircraft’s runway touchdown and landing, the captain of the aircraft was in contact with the control tower for one minute and sixteen seconds, during which the pilot made two mayday calls to air traffic controllers, informing air traffic controllers that the landing gear had jammed and that the engine had failed. The aircraft disappeared from the radar map after a few hours after the call of “Emergency Notification During Adverse Conditions”, while trying to land the aircraft, the upper floor of a house in Jinnah Garden, a residential area located one kilometer away from the runway, was flooded with water. It hit the key tank and then fell with a loud thud on other houses, due to which several houses were completely and partially damaged, and several cars and motorcycles parked outside the houses were also damaged.

The President of Bank of Punjab, Zafar Masood, and the passenger, Muhammad Zubair, a mechanical engineer by profession, who survived the plane crash, were fortunate. Three days after the crash, an 11-member Airbus team arrived in Karachi, inspected the engines, landing gear, wings and avionics system of the ill-fated plane and later went to France to decode the black box and voice recorder found at the crash site.

A month after the accident, an interim report was presented to the government in the National Assembly, in which the former federal minister of aviation said that the pilot ignored the instructions of the air traffic controllers, while both pilots were mentally ill and mentally absent. He was a victim of self-confidence.

According to PIA spokesman Abdullah Hafeez Khan, the families of the 80 passengers who died in the plane have been paid one crore rupees per person as insurance, 10 lakh rupees for immediate needs i.e. equipment and burial, while one lakh rupees have been paid for their belongings. Passengers’ payments could not be made due to non-submission of inheritance certificates and court cases related to their families’ inheritance.

According to the PIA spokesperson, it may take another year to get the final report of the plane crash. Several corrective measures have been taken to reduce the risks of these incidents in the future, including the safety management system for the protection of passengers. On top of that, this system applied to the planes of the national airline has been declared by the aircraft manufacturers Boeing and Airbus to be in line with the international standards.

The spokesman says that after the risk assessment, if any cockpit crew (captain and vice-captain) commits even a minor mistake, it is identified immediately after the aircraft lands on the runway. Penalties have also been proposed for cockpit crews found guilty of violating the rules and regulations, including grounding the aircraft instead of flying it, cancellation of license and training courses.