Charter plane crashes in Karachi, no survivors

[Lahore_Real_Estate]

KARACHI: A small plane with at least 21 people on board chartered to international oil company ENI crashed after taking off from the Karachi airport on Friday, killing all on board, an aviation official said.

The plane came down near the COD (Central Ordinance Depot) area of the Karachi airport, bursting into flames DawnNews reported

Pervez George, a spokesman for Pakistan’s Civil Aviation Authority, said the aircraft crashed near a military ordnance depot at Karachi’s Jinnah International Airport due to a technical fault soon after taking off.

He added it was en route to an oil field near Bhit Shah in Sindh province, some 190 km northeast of Karachi.

“When it took off, just after one minute, the pilot contacted the control tower saying that there was a fault in one of the engines. He was asked to return, but as it was turning back, it crashed,” George told Reuters.

He said there were 19 passengers and two crew on board. At least 12 bodies have been recovered so far. Aviation officials said there was at least one foreigner on board.

“The plane has been destroyed,” said Lt. Colonel Noor Agha, an army official supervising recue operations.

“The dead bodies are burned beyond recognition. It could not be recognised whether they are men or women. We don’t know nationalities.”

Civil aviation officials said the small aircraft was chartered by oil company ENI, which is based in Italy. No one from the company was responding to phone calls and the nationalities of those killed were not immediately available.

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 around 170 million people where inter-city travel is most efficient by air.

On July 28, a passenger Airbus 321 jet operated by Airblue crashed into hills of the Islamabad while coming into land after a flight from Karachi, killing 152 people on board.

Two Americans, an Austrian-born businessman, five children and two babies were among those killed in the worst aviation tragedy on Pakistani soil.

The only deadlier civilian plane crash involving a Pakistani jet occurred when a PIA Airbus A300 crashed into a cloud-covered hillside as it approached the Nepalese capital Kathmandu in 1992, killing 167 people.