Half a dozen people, including two pilots of a chartered plane, had a miraculous escape when their aircraft crash-landed on Dhanipur airstrip in Aligarh on Tuesday morning.
According to police reports, aircraft VT-AVV was reported to have hit an electric wire while landing before crashing on the airstrip. The aircraft was burnt even as firemen tried to douse the flames. The incident occurred when the aircraft, which was coming from New Delhi, touched a wire before landing on the airstrip, city magistrate Vineet Kumar Singh confirmed. The two pilots (Kishore and Dipak), along with engineers Ramprakash Gupta, Prabhat Trivedi, Anand Kumar and Kartik, suffered minor injuries.
The chartered plane was bringing a technician and some equipment for repair of an aircraft at the air training centre from Delhi when it crashed.
Meanwhile, senior officials of the Electricity department rushed to the site. They said an error of judgment on the part of the pilot might have led to the crash. Senior engineer Dharmendra Saraswat told reporters that according to preliminary reports, the pilot tried to land on a strip of the runway, which was still not operational.
He said the existing runway at Dhanipur was being expanded and work of shifting the 33 KVA high-tension wire was still not complete. “Instead of landing on the regular runway, the pilot tried to land the aircraft on the non-commissioned airstrip,” he said. “The work on shifting the existing cable will take another week before it is made underground,” he added.