Canoe

Wednesday, July 19, 2000

Dead pilots face charges in Indian crash

By INDRANIL SINGH-- Associated Press

PATNA, India (AP) -- Police filed criminal complaints Wednesday against the dead pilots of a jet that crashed in eastern India this week, killing 56 people.

Word of the charges came as another plane from the same airline, Alliance Air, suffered landing gear trouble and was forced to circle over an airport for an hour. The incident heightened concerns about technical problems plaguing Alliance Air's fleet of a dozen 20-year-old Boeing jets.

The complaint filed in Monday's crash accuses Captain M.S. Sohanpal and co-pilot A.S. Bagga of violating five different counts of Indian criminal and aviation laws. They include "culpable homicide not amounting to murder" and "rash driving or riding in a public place."

The complaint offered no details of what Sohanpal and Bagga are accused of doing wrong. Such complaints -- the first step in a criminal case in India -- are submitted to a judge, who decides if there is enough evidence to merit a trial. It is unusual that such charges would be lodged against deceased persons and it is unlikely that the case would go to trial.

The two pilots, 49 other people on board and five people on the ground were killed Monday when their Alliance Air Boeing 737-200 plummeted into a housing complex near the airport in Patna, the capital of India's poorest state, Bihar. Wednesday's criminal complaint based its charges on a statement from Prachi Rajgarhia, one of the seven passengers who survived the crash.

In Patna, meanwhile, investigators were trying to determine what caused the aircraft to suddenly lose altitude before it crashed. They were waiting for an analysis of the "black box," which records flight data and the conversation in the cockpit.

Accounts after the crash suggested that Sohanpal banked sharply and brought the plane too low, but the Indian Commercial Pilots Association has protested those accounts and said only an official inquiry can determine the cause of the disaster.

Elsewhere Wednesday, the Times of India newspaper reported that the jet that crashed was the worst one in the fleet and was considered an engineer's nightmare. It quoted unidentified officials as saying one of the jet's engines constantly reported slow response.

Alliance Air planes made emergency landings at least 18 times in the last six months, and technical problems resulted in a drop in cabin pressure on 15 occasions, the paper reported. Most of the emergency landings occurred in the last three months, it said.

Those findings were highlighted by Wednesday's incident in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh state: The wheels of a Boeing 737 jet belonging to Alliance Air locked just as the plane was about to land, Star-TV reported. The pilot managed to free the wheels after an hour, the report said.

Civil Aviation Minister Sharad Yadav said the government will modernize Alliance Air's entire fleet of 12 jets.

"The Alliance Air planes are old and we have asked the government to speed up the bidding process" to buy new ones, Yadav said after visiting the crash site.

-- Rachel Gibson (rgibson@hotmail.com), July 19, 2000