Chaotic situation at Karachi airport
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Experts say CAA has no set-up to deal with emergencies
By Saad Hasan
KARACHI: The chaos at the Karachi International Airport after the Airblue flight crash on Wednesday exposed the glaring loopholes in the emergency response set-up of the aviation business in Pakistan.
As the grief-stricken relatives of the deceased poured in, a few employees of the private airline manning the small makeshift counter, frantically tried to control the situation. People who had come to learn about the fate of the passengers had to return with just hopes that their relatives, friends or loved ones could be among the few survivors. But as reports trickled in from Islamabad, it became clear that none of the 152 unfortunate people onboard was alive. A man, worried about the fate of his brother, cried at one corner of the airport. In another corner, stood a shell-shocked person wondering what could have happened to the airplane which had departed just hours before.
He was right there. I had come to the airport to drop him at 6:30 in the morning, said Saad Akhter, pointing to the departure door. Please pray that he is among those who have made it alive and is only injured, Akhter said about his relative. Airblue officials asked me to wait at the airport. He was to be accommodated on a flight that would take the relatives of the victims to Islamabad in the evening.
Senior CAA officials were nowhere at the airport. There was no one from the regulator to console the anxious relatives and friends or give them vital information. Most people were asked to go home after being given an Islamabad-based inquiry number.
Syed Naseem Ahmed, an aircraft accident specialist, said the CAA had no system in place to deal with a panic situation. Most of the time, the CAA relies on the Army and the air force for the search and rescue operation, which is not wrong but then what about its role as commercial aviation regulator?
The Airblue crash is the first in Pakistans aviation history involving a major private airline, he said. Since 1953, there have been 20 major accidents in which more than 800 people have lost their lives, he said. The last major accident happened on July 10, 2006, when a PIA Fokker crashed in Multan, killing all 45 people onboard. Accidents happen everywhere in the world. But if you look at the frequency of flights in Pakistan, the ratio of accidents is quite high.
He said that the most disturbing aspect of accident investigations in the country was that the public never gets to find out what really brought down the aircraft. It is true that error on the part of pilots is behind 80 percent of accidents. However, the investigation report must be made public, Naseem Ahmed said. The investigation report into the Fokker crash was never released, in complete violation of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) rules, he said.
CAA Deputy Director General Air Vice Marshal Riaz-ul-Haq said that relatives were entitled to know the cause of the accident. However, the CAA could not immediately state the reasons of the crash, he said. We have formed an investigation team headed by Air Commodore Abdul Hamid. It will take some time for it to prepare the report and it is up to the government if it wants to release it.
He said that flying a plane over the Margalla Hills was not risky as there were more dangerous landing terrains in other countries. But flying is a dangerous business. We need to ensure this does not happen again.
Pilots say that a cloudy atmosphere around a hilly area always makes it difficult to manoeuvre an aircraft. But in the Airblue crash, an electronic system that guides the pilot in such a situation was not of much use.
Captain Suhail Baluch, the President of Pakistan Airline Pilots Association (PALPA), said that CAA had no procedure to instrumentally guide the pilot to land on a particular runway at Islamabad airport. Pilots depend on a visual approach to descend.
Khalid Iqbal adds from Islamabad:
Meanwhile, about 130 relatives of the unfortunate passengers reached Benazir Bhutto International Airport from Karachi through a PIA plane on government expenses.
The relatives were in a state of deep shock and grief and some were wailing on the occasion They will receive bodies of the deceased in Islamabad after DNA tests.
Some of the angry relatives of the passengers pelted stones at the airport building and raised anti-Airblue slogans on the occasion. They also raised slogans against the management for not giving information of their dead relatives.
The Airport Security Force (ASF) and police officials controlled the situation. According to Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) sources, some bodies have been recognised. The sources informed The News that the bodies of the recognised persons would be handed over to their relatives late Wednesday night or early Thursday.
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