Seven people were on board when the air ambulance crash landed in Delhi's Najafgarh.
Highlights
- Plane from Patna crash-landed in Delhi's Najafgarh
- Pilot denies the Alchemist Airways plane ran out of fuel
- Both engines failed, the pilot said; no one was seriously injured
"We were 40-60 kilometres short of Delhi when the left engine failed," said one of the two pilots flying a Beechcraft King Air C-90A that crash-landed in Delhi's Najafgarh yesterday.
Talking exclusively to NDTV, the pilot denied that the plane, operating as an air ambulance, lost power because it simply ran out of fuel on its flight from Patna to Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport.
The absence of an explosion post the crash-landing sparked speculation that there was virtually no fuel onboard, possibly because not enough fuel had been loaded onto the aircraft in Patna. Neither was the aircraft de-fuelled post the crash-landing yesterday, a standard procedure to prevent any accidental explosion after such an incident.
Deeply rutted field where the plane crashed.
"We had enough fuel onboard," said the pilot, who does not want to be identified. He said while the left engine stopped, the right engine too failed "just about a minute before we tried to land.
With moments left before they went down, the pilots were confronted with their worst possible nightmare - having to force land an aircraft which had effectively become an engine-less glider.
There were seven people onboard the Alchemist Airways plane, one of them a neurological patient being transported to the Medanta Medicity hospital in Gurgaon.
The pilots knew they had only one chance to land the aircraft. Would they survive, was the question. "We picked that particular spot because there were no houses and there were no electrical poles," the pilot said.
Tires of the aircraft that were shorn off along with the landing gear being collected by officials
They lowered their undercarriage (landing gear) and the aircraft came down on a dusty, bumpy field full of ruts. Denying that the undercarriage had immediately collapsed on landing, the pilot said the landing gear "lasted for a while" before being shorn off the aircraft which eventually came to a halt on its fuselage.
The Directorate General of Civil Aviation has launched an inquiry. No one was killed, most of the passengers were able to walk out unscathed. The patient being transported was not hurt and his assistant suffered what doctors described as minor bruises.
The aircraft that crash-landed is a smaller variant of the 11-seater Beechcraft Super King B-200 aircraft which crashed on December 22 last year near the Delhi airport, killing all 10 Border Security Force officials onboard.