18 killed in India jet accident
Plane breaks into two after crash-landing at storm-hit airport
KOZHIKODE: Fierce rain and winds lashed a plane carrying 190 people before it crash-landed and tore in two at an airport in southern India, killing at least 18 people and injuring scores more, officials said.
The Air India Express Boeing 737, on a special flight from Dubai to bring back Indians stranded overseas by the coronavirus pandemic, overshot the runway at Kozhikode in Kerala state late on Friday, plunged down an embankment and broke up, according to first accounts.
“Fuel had leaked out, so it was a miracle that the plane did not catch fire. The toll could have been much higher,” one senior emergency official at the scene said.
Passenger Renjith Panangad, 34, said the plane touched the ground and then everything went “blank”.
“After the crash, the emergency door opened and I dragged myself out somehow,” he said from a hospital bed in Kozhikode.
“The front part of the plane was gone. I don’t know how I made it, but I’m grateful. I am still shaken.”
Aviation minister Hardeep Singh Puri said the death toll had risen during the night to 18.
The fatalities included the two pilots as well as infants aged 10 months and 18 months, according to a hospital lis-t.
At least 15 people suffered critical injuries, doctors said.
Kozhikode is considered a tricky airport as it has a table-top runway with a steep drop at one end.
Kerala has been hit by severe floods in recent days and heavy rain had been falling for several hours at Kozhikode as the jet landed.
Indian media quoted air traffic control officials and a flight tracker website as showing that the Boeing 737 twice circled and started to land before it crashed during the third attempt. The jet repeatedly jumped up and down in buffeting winds before the landing, survivors told Indian television.
The Directorate General of Civil Aviation said only that the jet kept going to the end of the runway in the heavy rain and “fell down the ravine and broke in two”.
Several people on board had to be cut out with special equipment. It took three hours to clear all the injured and bodies, officials said.
Taxis ferried many of the injured to hospitals.
“Locals rushed to the spot after hearing the noise,” one rescue worker said.
“People came in cars, messages were being sent on WhatsApp... that people were needed to help.
“At first, people took the injured to the hospitals in their cars. Then the emergency services took over.”
The flight was one of hundreds in recent months to bring home tens of thousands of Indians stranded abroad by the pandemic, many of them in Gulf countries.