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PHUKET, Thailand: The pilot of a Thai passenger jet
that crashed killing 89 people chose to land despite warnings of
severe winds, officials said Tuesday, as relatives gathered to claim
lost loved ones.
All the bodies have now been
recovered from the blackened wreckage, police said, but 36 of the 57
foreign nationals thought to have died when the plane tried to land
on the resort island of Phuket remain unidentified.
Air traffic controllers had
warned the Indonesian pilot of dangerous winds as the plane,
operated by budget carrier One-Two-Go, came in to land in heavy rain
Sunday.
Moments later it skidded off the
runway into a wooded embankment and broke up in flames.
“There was a warning of wind
shear from the pilot in the previous flight, which landed 4 minutes
ahead,” Kumtorn Sirikorn, vice president of the air traffic
control body Aeronautical Radio of Thailand, told AFP.
“Air traffic control asked the
pilot whether he knew about this wind shear or not, and he said he
knew . . . then the air traffic control official gave him additional
information and asked him whether he still wanted to land or not.
“The pilot insisted he wanted
to land.”
Aviation officials previously
said that the pilot, Arief Mulyadi, who died in the crash, received
permission to abort the landing at the last minute.
However, his son had a different
account, telling media in Indonesia that he had been told by Phuket
authorities that his father had wanted to turn back to Bangkok but
the control tower said he should land.
Wind shear is a sudden change in
the wind that can throw a plane off course but disappear just as
quickly, leaving pilots struggling to keep a jet under control.
Udom Tantiprasongchai, president
of One-Two-Go, conceded the airline had to accept partial
responsibility, but vigorously defended their crew.
“It is too soon to jump to
conclusions, it is unfair to our staff. Please wait until the
investigation is finished,” he told reporters.
His vice president Kajit
Habanananda urged investigators not to assume that human error was
to blame for Thailand’s worst air disaster in a decade.
“It’s true that there was a
warning of wind shear from the previous flight,” Kajit said.
“But the wind is constantly changing.”
Deputy transport minister Sansern
Wongchaum has said the black box flight recorders would be sent to
the United States, and the cause of the crash would be known within
two weeks.
At Phuket airport, grieving
relatives tried to find details of loved ones lost in the tragedy,
but some were frustrated by the identification process.
--AFP
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