ISLAMABAD – Pakistan blocked the head of an airline whose jet crashed near the capital from leaving the country as it began an investigation Saturday into the country's second major air disaster in less then two years.
The Bhoja Air passenger jet crashed Friday as it tried to land in a thunderstorm at Islamabad's main airport, killing all 127 people on board. The small domestic airline, which resumed operations in March after an 11-year pause, has said the weather was the cause.
Speaking at the scene of the crash, Interior Minister Rehman Malik said Saturday that Farooq Bhoja, head of Bhoja Air, had been put on the "exit control list," meaning he can't leave Pakistan. Such a ban is often put on someone suspected or implicated in a criminal case.
Malik said, "It is being said that the aircraft was pretty old, so it has been ordered to investigate thoroughly the air worthiness of the Bhoja Air aircraft."
"The causes will be investigated, whether it was any fault in the aircraft, it was lightning, the bad weather or any other factor that caused the loss of precious lives," he said. The plane's flight data recording systems, key to any investigation, have been recovered.
Given the violent storm lashing Islamabad during the accident, some experts have speculated that "wind shear," sudden changes in wind that can lift or smash an aircraft into the ground during landing, may have been a factor. It may even have been a dangerous localized form of the phenomena, called a microburst. That can cause planes to lose airspeed suddenly or lift abruptly if a headwind suddenly changes to a tail wind during takeoff or landing.
Soldiers and emergency workers at first light began the grim task of looking for bodies and body parts among the debris from the Boeing 737-200, which was spread out over a one-mile stretch of wheat farms around three miles from the Benazir Bhutto International Airport.
The plane was on a flight from the southern city of Karachi to Islamabad when it crashed at dusk.
One soldier had a plastic bag over his hand and was picking up small bits of flesh. Another was using a stick to get at remains in a tree. The smell of decomposing bodies was beginning to fill the air.
"We are collecting these so that the souls are not desecrated," one of them said.
The officers were also picking up personal effects of the passengers, making piles of documents, bank cards, gold and bangles.
The last major plane crash in the country -- and Pakistan's worst -- occurred in July 2010 when an Airbus A321 aircraft operated by domestic carrier Airblue crashed into the hills overlooking Islamabad, killing all 152 people aboard. A government investigation blamed the pilot for veering off course amid stormy weather.
Bhoja Air started domestic operations in Pakistan in 1993 and eventually expanded to international flights to the United Arab Emirates in 1998. The company suspended operations in 2001 due to financial difficulties but resumed them in 2012.
Nasim Ahmed, a respected former crash investigator, said it appeared at this stage that the age and air worthiness of the plane were unlikely causes. He said that a combination of factors during the most crucial stage of the flight, the landing, was probably to blame, possibly the weather or some form of unexpected incident that caused the pilot to lose vital awareness of the plane's location.
According to the Web site www.airfleets.net, the Bhoja jet was 32 years old and first saw service with British Airways in South Africa. Thirty-two years is not especially old for an aircraft, and age by itself is rarely an important factor in crashes.
Ahmed said the accident highlighted weaknesses in Pakistan's aviation industry, which he said couldn't be separated from management problems in the Civil Aviation Authority, poor government oversight and corruption and nepotism in the state-owned Pakistan International Airlines.
In 2007, the European Union banned most PIA flights from its member's airports for eight months due to safety concerns. "There are problems in the overall handling of the country, and the Civil Aviation Authority is not an isolated pocket of good governance," he said.
