Recovery efforts continue in Air India crash

Searchers combed a steep, wooded hillside in southern India on Saturday for the remains of 158 passengers and crew of an Air India Express flight and clues to the cause of the country’s worst aviation accident in a decade.

With the voice recorder not yet recovered, it was unclear why Flight IX-812, carrying mostly migrant workers returning from the Persian Gulf, overshot the runway in Mangalore and plunged down the hillside early Saturday. Officials said the weather was good at the time, and there were no indications of mechanical problems or a communications mix-up with air traffic control.

Both the British pilot and the Indian co-pilot of the Boeing 737-800 were experienced at landing at Mangalore’s tricky table-top airport, officials said. However, they said human error might have been a factor.

The five-hour flight from Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, had 166 passengers and crew members. Eight people survived the fiery crash. Officials said all the survivors had been in middle seats.

One survivor, passenger Umar Farooq, told local journalists from his hospital bed that he jumped from the plane after impact. He walked, got a ride on a motorcycle and then a three-wheeled auto-rickshaw taxi to a hospital, where he was being treated for burns to his face and hands.

“It has been a hair-raising experience, and I am fortunate to still be alive,” he said.

Officials said there were 23 children onboard, including four infants, and in addition to the pilots, a cabin crew of four.

“There was no SOS or any contact between the pilot and [air traffic control] after a clearance was given to land,” said Peter Abraham, director of the Mangalore Airport. “Plus, after you have landed and are overshooting, there is just no time to tell the ATC anything anyway.

“Primarily it looks like human error, but it could be technical also,” Abraham said. “It is only after this inquiry is over that we will be able to get a clearer picture.”

The aircraft continued past the runway over several hundred feet of rough tarmac and dirt at the end of the strip, hit an antenna that is used to guide planes’ automatic pilot systems, ploughed through an airport barrier and fell about 1,000 feet down a 60-degree slope, tearing up trees as it went, breaking into pieces and bursting into flames.

A resident who goes by only one name, Chandrashekhar, said he was awakened by a big explosion about 6 a.m. and ran with other villagers to the crash site. They heard women and children’s cries coming from the burning wreckage but couldn’t reach them because of the intense heat.

They helped a few people who had been thrown clear, taking them to the main road.

“By the time we returned, all the calls, cries had stopped, I guess they’d burned alive inside the wreckage,” he said. “It was absolutely terrible.”

The salvage operation Saturday was hampered by the terrain and rain-soaked ground. Live images from the crash site showed relief workers, police officers and residents in two lines passing stretchers laden with bodies and body parts up the slope.

State-owned Air India, which until relatively recently enjoyed a monopoly, has suffered from weak management systems, political meddling and safety problems, including reports of captains piloting their aircraft drunk, falling asleep and overshooting airports and, in one case last year, getting into an in-flight fist-fight with the cabin crew.

Mohan Ranganathan, a former Air India pilot and aviation security expert, said word in the industry is that the airline issued a circular citing the importance of smooth landings, which has led to pilots coming in fast and doing a “power on touchdown” maneuver in which they come in a little hard and fast for a smoother approach. Another factor could be fatigue, he said, given that the crew was at the end of a Dubai roundtrip run, more than 10 hours of flying time.

Because the Mangalore runway affords little margin for error, it has been given a special designation by the government. Pilots taking off and landing at these airports undergo extra training on its terrain and weather conditions and are periodically put through special checks, airline officials said.

One aviation reporter said the pilot, Zlatko Glusica, had landed 19 times at Mangalore Airport and copilot H.S. Ahluwalia, one of Air India’s more respected pilots, had more than 90 landings there.

The crash has renewed a national focus on the use of foreign pilots, who account for 10% of India’s roughly 5,500 civilian captains.

India, under pressure from airlines, recently extended by a year the deadline for phasing out foreign pilots on Indian carriers until July 31, 2011, a move decried by Indian pilots unions.

Foreign pilots sometimes take jobs that domestic pilots don’t want, however, including those involving propeller aircraft on shorter hops.

The strong growth of India’s aviation sector has increased demand for qualified pilots, and the nation is likely to need 8,000 additional pilots by 2020, analysts said.

mark.magnier@latimes.com

Anshul Rana in The Times’ New Delhi Bureau contributed to this report.