A charter aircraft carrying staff from an Italian oil company crashed minutes after take-off in Pakistan’s business hub of Karachi yesterday, killing all 21 people on board.
The pilot of the twin engine turboprop operated by Pakistani charter JS Air reported engine trouble then nose dived near a military depot in a Karachi suburb, in an accident that civil aviation blamed on a technical fault.
“The plane has been totally gutted and there are no survivors,” Lieutenant Colonel Noor Alam told reporters near the crash site in Gulistan-e-Jauhar.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Television footage showed the aircraft split in two, the front part totally destroyed and the rear section, marked JS Air, torn off alongside two wheels.
“The cause of crash was a technical fault. The pilot reported that one of the engines was not working. Everyone died. There were no survivors,” Pakistani Civil Aviation Authority spokesman Pervaiz George said.
The 21 people on board were believed to be mostly Pakistanis, although embassies said they were checking to see whether the dead included foreigners.
A company official in Karachi said the plane was chartered by ENI, an Italian oil company, and was carrying its employees.
The Beech 1900 aircraft took off from Karachi’s Jinnah airport shortly after 7am on a 200km journey to an oil field at Bhit Shah in the southern province of Sindh.
The pilot contacted air traffic control almost immediately, reporting engine trouble and was given permission to return to the airport. Witnesses were quoted as saying the plane nose dived.
“It caught fire,” Alam told reporters near the crash site.
“The bodies of the pilot and co-pilot have not been retrieved so far. We will have to cut the front portion to recover their bodies,” Alam said.
“The bodies were charred. One of my colleagues on the site literally fainted after seeing the bodies,” he added.
George and police said there were 21 people on the aircraft — 17 passengers, one guard, one technician, the pilot and co-pilot.
“Soon after they left, they contacted the airport control tower and said there was a problem in one of the engines. The plane was directed to return and soon after it crashed,” George said.
An official from JS Air confirmed that the doomed aircraft had been a Beech 1900, but declined to make further comment.
The company Web site says it operates three Beech 1900C aircraft dating from the early 1990s. It says it offers a “wide-ranging charter business domestically” and flies internationally, operating charters in Sri Lanka.
Karachi is Pakistan’s business and economic capital. It is a teeming city of 16 million on the south coast with an Arabian Sea port where NATO supplies dock in preparation for travel overland to soldiers in Afghanistan.
Plane crashes are relatively rare in Pakistan, an enormous country of about 170 million people where intercity travel is most efficient by air.
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