PK-661 was fit to fly at take-off, black box report reveals

ISLAMABAD: Both engines of ill-fated PIA PK-661 —which crashed near Havelian in December last year— were fit to fly at take-off, a black box report revealed on Thursday.

The report —received by Civil Aviation Authority which is investigating the incident — said that the pilot gave the first call at 4:12 pm. However, he was relaxed at that time.

Two minutes later at 4:14 pm, the pilot gave a mayday call to the control tower. An engine had stopped working by that time.

The report said that the news of the plane crash was received after 10 to 15 minutes after the mayday call from the pilot.

The black box report stated that the plane did not try to land. However, the CAA said that it was investigating why the plane crashed despite one functioning engine.

CAA further said that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had visited Gwadar in same plane a week back.

Information recovered from the black box is very crucial to unveil the reasons behind the plane crash.

A PIA plane carrying 47 people crashed Wednesday on a domestic flight from the mountainous northern city of Chitral to Islamabad, killing all on board.

The plane took off from Chitral around 3:50PM and PIA said the plane crashed at 1642 local time (1142 GMT) in the Havelian area of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, about 125 km north of Islamabad.

Popular personality Junaid Jamshed and his wife were also on the ill-fated plane.

Jamshed was in Chitral and his name was among the list of passengers on board the flight. 

Timeline of Air disasters in Pakistan

The country's last major air disaster was in 2015 when a military helicopter crashed in a remote northern valley, killing eight people including the Norwegian, Philippine and Indonesian envoys and the wives of Malaysian and Indonesian envoys.

In 2012, a Bhoja Airline plane, a Boeing 737 carrying 121 passengers and six crew members, crashed near Islamabad just before touchdown.

The worst aviation tragedy on Pakistani soil came in July 2010 when an Airbus 321 passenger jet operated by the private airline Airblue crashed into hills overlooking Islamabad. The flight was coming in from Karachi. All 152 people on board were killed in the accident, which occurred amid heavy rain and poor visibility.

Another deadly civilian plane crash involving a Pakistani jet came to pass in 1992 when a PIA Airbus A300 crashed into a cloud-covered hillside on its approach to the Nepalese capital Kathmandu, killing 167 people.