Panel formed to investigate Kozhikode crash

NEWDELHI: The Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB), the regulatory body in charge of the investigation into the Air India Express crash in Kozhikode that claimed 18 lives, has appointed a team of five investigators to lead the probe.

AAIB director general Aurobindo Handa has appointed Capt S S Chahar, a former DGCA-designated examiner for pilots of

B737NG aircraft, as the Investigatorin-Charge, according to an order issued by the bureau on Thursday. HT has reviewed the copy of the order.

Chahar will complete the inquiry and submit the report to AAIB, preferably within five months from the date of issue of this order, it stated. He will be assisted by operations expert Ved Prakash; senior aircraft maintenance engineer -B737 Mukul Bhardwaj former DGCA; Gp. Capt. (Dr) Y S Dahiya,aviation

medicine expert and Jasbir Singh Larhga, deputy director AAIB.

The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) announced last week that the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder were recovered from the crash site. The cockpit voice recorder keeps a recording of the conversations taking place in a plane’s cockpit and along with the flight data recorder, which logs data such as airspeed and altitude, it can help in determining the cause of the crash.

The Boeing 737 jet, on a Vande Bharat mission from Dubai, was bringing in Indians stranded abroad due to the Covid-19 pandemic, met with an accident while landing at the Kozhikode airport on August 7 — making it one of the deadliest commercial aviation disasters in the country in about a decade. The crash bore a similarity to the 2010 Mangalore crash when an Air India Express Boeing 737 overshot a tabletop runway and crashed.