The Baramati plane crash, which killed Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar and four others on Wednesday, could have been avoided if the airport runway had been equipped with an instrument landing system to guide the pilot through marginal visibility, according to an aviation expert.
There is a need to ensure that all evidence at the crash site is preserved and not tampered with, as they will be crucial for the probe, which is being carried out by the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB), they said, adding that the (exact) cause of the accident can only be known after the investigation is completed.
“Baramati airport has a small field runway, but it is sufficient for (aircraft like) Learjet to land. I do not think that the runway would contribute to this crash, as it happened before or outside the runway.
“So, it is not the runway. (But) Yes, if the runway was equipped with ILS (instrument landing system) or other instrument systems that would guide the pilot properly during marginal visibility conditions, this (the crash) could have been avoided,” retired pilot Ehsan Khalid told PTI Video service.
The reported visibility was “marginal”, which means neither very good nor bad, and it was not so bad that it would have called for a diversion, he said, adding that “it was not something which we can call pure visual flight conditions to be like clear skies”.
“It appears that the aircraft had made an approach to land and thereafter it had gone round, which means it had aborted the landing and gone round in the first attempt of its landing,” Khalid said.
Stating that while the cause of the accident can only be known after the investigation is completed, he said as per the available information, “there is no clear evidence whether this go round was done because of no-contact with the runway or because of poor visibility or weather conditions or unstabilised approach”.
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While there are no details on that, he said the “first approach was carried out as a missed go round and thereafter this aircraft was on a second approach when it met with this accident”.
Khalid said as far as he knew, Baramati airfield does not have an instrument landing system, and so if there is a poor visibility condition, then the pilot and the aircraft have to actually navigate through absolute eye contact with the runway, and if the visibility is down, there is very little help that comes from the instruments.
Describing Sumit Kapoor — who had a flying experience of over 15,000 flying hours and was commanding the mid-size Learjet 45 small jet at the time of crash — a gentle soul, Khalid said, “I do not know what was the condition at that point of time in the cockpit or whether bad weather was coupled with some technical fault and that aggravated the situation so that the aircraft could not be controlled on approach”.
“I am at a loss to say why it happened, and I would not like to conjecture anything on this,” he said.
“If it is something that is related to the visibility and weather conditions, we do not have sufficient reports to actually come to any kind of a conclusion that there was a technical defect or not,” he said.
He also said that since there is no survivor in this crash, the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and flight data recorder (FDR) will be recovered from the wreckage for forensic evidence by the investigators.
Moreover, the DGCA by now would have already taken into their possession all the technical documents related to this aircraft in Mumbai or wherever the technical documents are stored, so that they will see if there was any deficiency in the aircraft at the time of dispatch, which was not disclosed to the pilot, he said.
Generally, for such VIP flights, aircraft technical clearances are also considered to be very important, he added.
“First of all, the investigators will try to recover the black box of the aircraft and cordon off. As you can see from the pictures that we are getting from there, the people who’ve all surrounded the aircraft and the debris, and this is not the most ideal scene.
“I just hope they sanitise that area and ensure that nobody tampers with or tries to pick some of the evidence that will be crucial in the AAIB (probe),” said aviation expert Sanjay Lazar.
Baramati airport is a very well-equipped airport, while the mid-sized business jet Learjet 45 is an “extremely safe” aircraft, Lazar said.
Refusing to speculate on the cause of the crash at this time, he said, “I would rather like to see what will happen. They’ll collect the evidence, decode the black box and then they’ll be able to say what had happened. I’m not even sure if the pilot issued a mayday call or if it just occurred in a flash”.
He, however, said the pilots who fly the chief ministers, deputy chief ministers, and the cabinet ministers are highly-qualified pilots, and as it was a bright sunny day, “there’s really no reason for us to understand why this could have happened”.
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