Pakistan airline chief held in crash inquiry

PAKISTAN has ordered the head of an airline into protective custody to prevent him leaving the country as an investigation got under way yesterday into the country’s second major plane crash in less than two years.

A Bhoja Air passenger jet crashed on Friday as it tried to land in a thunderstorm at Islamabad’s main airport, killing all 127 people on board and reviving concerns about aviation safety in a country saddled by massive economic problems, an embattled government, and Islamist insurgency.

The small domestic airline, which only resumed operations last month after suspending them in 2001 due to financial difficulties, said after the crash that bad weather was the cause of the accident.

Speaking at the scene of the disaster, interior minister Rehman Malik said that Bhoja Air chief Farooq Bhoja had been put on the “exit control list,” and cannot leave Pakistan.

Such a ban is often put on suspects or those implicated in a criminal case. Malik said Bhoja had been ordered into protective custody and a criminal investigation launched into the incident.

He later said that the airline “seems to be at fault as it had acquired a very old aircraft”.

“If the airline management doesn’t have enough money it doesn’t mean you go and buy a 30-year-old or more aircraft as if it were a rickshaw and start an airline.”

The Bhoja jet was 32 years old and first entered service with British Airways in South Africa.

The ageing 737-200 variant has been phased out or banned in several countries.

Bhoja Air started flights in 1993 but suspended operations in 2001 because of financial problems. It resumed domestic flights only last month.

Many of the relatives gathered at the hospital had flown from Karachi yesterday morning for the task of identifying victims. Women and men sobbed openly and pushed reporters away.

“My brothers are gone! My brothers are gone!” wailed Mohammad Shahzad, slumping to the ground by the hospital entrance. One brother had been identified, he said, and the other remained missing. Both had been on a day-long business trip linked to the transport company run by the three siblings.

“We don’t know what to tell the kids, we don’t know what to tell my mother,” Shahzad said. “They keep calling. I told them that there was an accident and we don’t know anything yet.”

Prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said he has ordered a judicial commission to investigate the accident, and added: “It is not fair to reach any conclusion without a proper investigation.”

Jahanzeb Khan, a Bhoja Air representative, declined to comment.

The weak government has come under immediate media criticism for granting Bhoja, one of only three private airlines in Pakistan, a licence.

Gilani and Malik may be trying to deflect some of that criticism. Such is the distrust of the state in Pakistan, few believe that the government has the will to hold wealthy or political connected people accountable, or carry out credible investigations.

Given the violent storm lashing Islamabad during the accident, some experts have speculated that “wind shear,” sudden changes in wind that can lift or smash an aircraft into the ground during landing, may have been a factor. It may even have been a dangerous local form of the phenomena, called a microburst, that can cause planes to lose airspeed suddenly or lift abruptly if a headwind suddenly changes to a tail wind during take-off or landing.

Soldiers and emergency workers at first light began the grim task of looking for bodies and body parts among the debris from the Boeing 737-200, which was spread out over a one-mile stretch of wheat farms around three miles from the Benazir Bhutto International Airport.

The plane was on a flight from the southern city of Karachi to Islamabad when it crashed at dusk.

One soldier had a plastic bag over his hand and was picking up small bits of flesh. Another was using a stick to reach remains in a tree. The smell of decomposing bodies was beginning to fill the air.

“We are collecting these so that the souls are not desecrated,” one of them said.

Officers were also picking up personal effects, making piles of documents, bank cards, gold and bangles.

The last major plane crash in the country – and Pakistan’s worst – occurred in July 2010 when an Airbus A321 aircraft operated by domestic carrier Airblue crashed into the hills overlooking Islamabad, killing all 152 people aboard.

The aircraft from Karachi was preparing to land when it went down in the fog-shrouded Margalla Hills to the north of Islamabad.

Experienced pilots said at the time the craggy hills and unpredictable wind patterns make landing at Islamabad difficult even in favourable weather conditions.

A government investigation blamed the plane’s pilot for veering off course amid stormy weather.

Despite the apparent age of the Boeing 737-200, listed on the www.airfleets.net website, 32 years is not especially old for an aircraft, according to aviation experts .

Age alone is rarely an important factor in crashes, said Nasim Ahmed, a former crash investigator. He said it appeared at this stage that the age and air worthiness of the plane were unlikely causes for the accident.

He added that a combination of factors during the most crucial stage of the flight, the landing, was probably to blame; possibly the weather or some form of unexpected incident that caused the pilot to lose vital awareness of the plane’s location.