A five member panel has been formed to look into the air crash at the Karipur airport in Kerala, the Aircraft Accident Investigation Board (AAIB) said on Thursday. The panel will inquire into the circumstances that led to the plane crash last week in which 18 people were killed. In a statement, the board said, "The investigator-in-charge will complete its inquiry and submit the report to AAIB, India, preferably within five months from the date of the issue of this order."
Captain SS Chahar, a former designated examiner on B737NG (aircraft), will be the investigator-in-charge to inquire into the circumstances of the August 7 accident. He will be assisted by four other investigators, the AAIB said. These are Ved Prakash, Operations expert, Mukul Bhardwaj, Senior Aircraft Maintenance Engineer - B737, Group Capt YS Dahiya, Aviation Medicine Expert and Jasbit Singh Larhga, Deputy Director of AAIB. The headquarters of the investigation will be in New Delhi, said the statement.
An Air India Express flight from Dubai with 190 people, including a six-member crew, overshot the tabletop runway during landing at the Karipur airport in heavy rains on August 7 evening. It was part of the Vande Bharat Mission flights of the union government for the repatriation of stranded Indians living abroad to be able to come home.
The narrow-body B737 plane, which hovered in the air for a few minutes, plunged down 30 feet and broke into three, killing 18 people, including both pilots. The AAIB said in its statement that it ‘desires as per its mandate to investigate and determine the probable cause(s) and contributory factor(s) leading to the accident and make recommendations to avoid recurrence of such accidents in future.’
Earlier, top authorities of the Airport Authority of India (AAI) visited the airport and said that the runway where the flight crashed had not suffered damages.
(With PTI input)
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