Official cites confusion

The aircraft was bringing a wealthy businessman’s daughter and her friends home from a Dubai bachelorette party.

Bombardier representatives for the commercial and business aircraft divisions said the company was saddened by the accidents, adding their thoughts were with those impacted and their families.

Siphengphet and Mark Masluch said the planes are “safe and reliable” and other planes haven’t been grounded.

“It (Q400) has been designed to be robust and reliable in consideration to high cycle demands of regional airlines,” she said in an interview.

Masluch said more than 1,000 Challenger 600 series planes have been delivered and are “one of the most robust and reliable aircraft in business aviation.”

He called the back-to-back crashes an “unfortunate coincidence.”

“Certainly each accident is isolated to its own circumstances so it would be inappropriate to comment on any links between or just assume or speculate while both investigations are ongoing,” Masluch said in a separate interview.

The causes of both crashes aren’t immediately available but a top airport official said the pilot did not follow landing instructions from the control tower, and had approached the airport’s one runway from the wrong direction.

“The airplane was not properly aligned with the runway. The tower repeatedly asked if the pilot was OK and the reply was ‘yes’,” said Raj Kumar Chetri, the airport’s general manager.

The 17-year-old plane had circled Tribhuvan International Airport twice as it waited for clearance to land, a company official said.

A recording of the conversations between the pilot and air traffic controllers indicated confusion over which direction the plane should land.

Just before landing the pilot asks “Are we cleared to land?”

The Q400 has sustained several landing gear incidents over the years but this is just the second crash of the aircraft resulting in death.

All 49 people on board were killed on Feb. 12, 2009 when a Colgan Air flight from Newark Liberty International Airport to Buffalo Niagara International Airport, stalled and crashed into a house while preparing to land at the airport.

The National Transportation Safety Board concluded that pilot error, including the response by the captain, was the main cause of the accident.

Officials at Kathmandu Medical College, the closest hospital to Nepal’s only international airport, said they were treating 16 survivors of the Q400 crash, whose earlier versions were called Dash 8.

Meanwhile, the out-of-production Challenger business jet that crashed in Iran was owned by the private holding company of Turkish businessman Huseyin Basaran.

Iranian investigators on Monday found the “black box” from the Turkish plane.

It remains unclear what caused the crash,