Last week, an ATR 72 model plane of the Nepalese YETI company, which was about to land in the city of Pokhara, crashed. The passengers and crew perished. A joint investigative committee for the local authorities and the French investigative authority, which represents the plane’s manufacturer, will submit conclusions in early February. In the meantime, this is an opportunity to get to know the special airports in Nepal, where a combination of unique topography and a constant need for air transport has, unfortunately, caused serious accidents over the years.
While live on Facebook: a passenger took a picture of the crash in Nepal from inside the plane watch
There are several airports in Nepal, each of which has unique characteristics. The field in the capital Kathmandu is at a high altitude and in Lukla, in the east of the country, the landing and takeoff are carried out on the same runway, in two different directions. The Pokhara airport was inaugurated at the beginning of January, it replaces the old field which is about 3 km away from it. The field was built by a Chinese company as a model for large projects such as trains and bridges, ports and railways, just like in Israel.
Aviation infrastructure is an expensive thing that requires planning and implementation takes about five years. Those Chinese infrastructure companies specialize in the planning and execution phases and have extensive experience in the construction of airports such as Hong Kong and Macau.
The new airport in Pokhara has one runway of 8,200 feet, the standard length of a runway in the world. Parallel to it there are four parking stands for aircraft of the type involved in the accident last week, two of which are equipped with a bridge as we know them and another four stands for lighter aircraft. The runway is equipped with advanced lighting, which allows most take-offs and landings in low visibility. The track is cast in concrete, unlike most cases in the world, where the tracks are paved with asphalt. The concrete prevents sinking into soil that is not compacted enough and improves the grip on rocky terrain.
The height of the field is a little over 2,000 feet, not particularly high, but around the field are the Himalayas, which force the pilot to descend below their height in order to reach the runway – and if he failed to land, he must take off again (“go around” in the professional parlance). All of these are not necessarily among the causes of the serious accident from last week.
We will expand on the investigation of accidents in the following columns, but it could be seen that in the first stage, teams arrived at the scene of the crash to locate survivors and document the fragments. These teams determined quite quickly that at least seventy of the seventy-two passengers and crew had perished. Later, photographs were collected from destroyed cameras in the field near it, as well as amateur photographs, in one of which you can see the plane tilting sharply on its side during the final stages of landing. One of the explanations is that the plane had a technical fault in the rack system. This is one of many theories that will come up.
At the scene of the accident, the investigators will be able to collect and photograph exhibits in order to determine what their condition was at the moment of the crash and if this condition corresponds to a normal landing process. The Nepali plane crashed very close to the start of the runway in fair weather, which raises the suspicion of technical failure or human error.
The ATR plane is manufactured in France and is considered very reliable and very common for short domestic flights in different parts of the world. In Israel, too, we had the privilege of getting to know them at the companies Arkia and Israel. They are simple and quick to operate, built to land and take off from relatively short routes and make less noise than the large jet planes.
So what happened in Pokhara we will know very soon, a detailed report of an international standard will be made known to all interested parties, the airlines that operate the plane, pilots who take off from Pokhara and of course the aircraft manufacturer – all with the aim that beyond participating in the grief of the families of those who perished, the investigation will be able to prevent the recurrence of similar cases in the future.
The writer is the chairman of the Israeli Pilots Association.