Garbled landing instructions may have caused fiery crash
NEPAL: A plane carrying 71 people from Bangladesh swerved erratically and flew dangerously low before crashing and erupting in flames as it landed yesterday in Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, killing at least 50 people, officials and witnesses said.
A Tribhuvan International Airport official said the pilot of USBangla Airlines flight BS211 did not follow landing instructions and approached the airport’s sole runway from the wrong direction. However, a recording of the conversations between the pilot and air traffic controllers indicated confusion over which direction the plane should land. In the recording, posted by air traffic monitoring website liveatc.net, the conversation veers repeatedly between whether the pilot should land from the south or the north.
The exact number of dead and injured remained unclear amid the chaos of the crash, but Brigadier General Gokul Bhandari, a Nepalese army spokesman, said it was clear that at least 50 people had died.
Officials at Kathmandu Medical College, the closest hospital to the airport, said they were treating 16 survivors.
The flight from Dhaka to Kathmandu was carrying 67 passengers – 32 from Bangladesh, 33 from Nepal, and one each from China and the Maldives – and four crew, according to an airline spokesman.
The plane swerved repeatedly as it prepared to land, said witness Amanda Summers, an American working in Nepal. ‘‘It was flying so low I thought it was going to run into the mountains.’' – AP