Plane carrying 71 people erupts in flames at landing
KATHMANDU, Nepal — A plane carrying 71 people from Bangladesh swerved erratically and flew dangerously low before crashing and erupting in flames as it landed Monday in Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital, killing at least 49 people, officials and witnesses said.
A senior airport official said the pilot of US-Bangla Airlines flight BS211 did not follow landing instructions from the control tower and 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.
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 the air traffic monitoring website LiveATC.net, conversation veers repeatedly about whether the pilot should land on the airport’s single runway from the south or the north.
Just before landing the pilot asks, “Are we cleared to land?”
Moments later, the controller comes back on, using a tone rarely heard in such conversations — perhaps even panic — and tells the pilot: “I say again, turn!”
Seconds later, the controller orders firetrucks onto the runway.
The exact number of dead and injured remained unclear amid the chaos of the crash and the rush of injured to nearby hospitals. Police spokesman Manoj Neupane said Tuesday that 49 people were confirmed to have been killed and 22 injured. They were being treated in several hospitals in Nepal’s capital.
US-Bangla Airlines flight BS211 from Dhaka to Kathmandu was carrying 67 passengers and four crew members, according to an airline spokesman.
An AP journalist who arrived at the scene soon after the crash saw the twin-propeller plane broken into several large pieces, with dozens of firefighters and rescue workers clustered around the wreckage in a grassy field near the runway. Hundreds of people stood on a nearby hill, staring down at what remained of the Bombardier Dash 8 aircraft.
The plane swerved repeatedly as it prepared to land in Kathmandu, said Amanda Summers, an American working in Nepal.
“It was flying so low I thought it was going to run into the mountains,” said Summers, who watched the crash from the terrace of her home office, not far from the airport. “All of a sudden there was a blast and then another blast.”
The plane had circled Tribhuvan International Airport twice as it waited for clearance to land, Mohammed Selim, the airline’s manager in Kathmandu, told Dhaka-based Somoy TV by telephone.
US-Bangla spokesman Kamrul Islam said the plane was carrying 32 passengers from Bangladesh, 33 from Nepal and one each from China and the Maldives. He did not provide the nationalities of the four crew members.