Havelian plane crash: SHC orders authorities to identify those responsible

KARACHI: The Sindh High Court (SHC) on Tuesday ordered the authorities concerned to submit a report identifying those responsible for the Havelian plane crash in 2016. A division bench of the SHC sought the report while hearing a petition into the plane crash which had resulted in the death of forty-eight people.

The bench asked the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) director-general and the Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) director technical to submit a detailed report on the procedures of issuing maintenance certificates for the ATR planes.

The CAA director requested the court that he should be given some time to furnish those reports, which the court accepted. The petition, filed by the parents of one of the pilots killed in the crash, alleged that the CAA and PIA permitted faulty planes to fly and claimed that their son was sometimes forced to operate three flights a day.

During the last hearing, a report by the Aircraft Accidents Investigation Board of Pakistan was submitted to the court. The report said that a fractured turbine blade triggered a "complicated" sequence of failures that culminated in the crash.

"AAIB is of the view that the crash event was one of its kind that had never been experienced on any other ATR aircraft internationally," the report said. "The way chain of events occurred was highly unexpected and exceptional."

During Tuesday's hearing, the court remarked that this report would not have come if the court hadn't ordered it and even then it took four years. The court also expressed its annoyance over the officials concerned not having read the report. It asked what lessons have been learnt from the crash.

"The officials should have come here after reading the report, but they didn't," Justice Mazhar stated.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2020