WITH no nose landing gear and a crash on the cards, the cockpit crew of a US-Bangla domestic flight to Cox’s Bazar kept them cool and landed their Boeing 737 with 171 lives on board in Chattogram on Wednesday. Luckily nobody was seriously hurt during the emergency landing.
Flight BS-141 took off from Dhaka, with 164 passengers, including 11 children, and 7 crew members. As the cockpit crew, led by Capt Mohammad Zakaria, was preparing to land in Cox’s Bazar, they realised the nose landing gear did not extend and locked in place. The pilots decided to head towards Chattogram’s Shah Amanat International Airport as that was better equipped to deal with an emergency.
This is the second accident regarding a US Bangla plane this year. While the first one was possibly due to pilot error but this time the reversed is happened. The fact is that — the passengers were saved because of the pilot’s smartness.
The question remains as to why the landing gears did not extend. This is a critical physical malfunction of the plane and it should have been detected as technical flaws. The department of civil aviation is the ultimate authority responsible for safety of the every aircraft that takes off from our airport.
After the first US Bangla crash pilots reported to media about how the airlines in their bid to maximise profit allegedly overwork their pilots, send-off flights even when the rules don’t permit, or even sometimes hide defects because grounding of aircraft means a huge amount of loss. Our question is concerning the role of the Ministry of Civil Aviation.
Pilots alleged that they are forced by management to operate in situations where it’s prudent not to fly. Maintaining flight schedule and commercial considerations take precedence over flight safety. Private carriers try to land even when the situation is least favourable. They try to depart for a destination in rough weather even with a very marginal visibility, they compromise on technical issues, fly without weather radar, forbid pilots to give entry in the engineering log especially at outstations as grounding would cost money. The airlines must be held responsible and the accountability for safety of the flights cannot be avoided by the Ministry Of Civil Aviation. The truth is the ministers are useless for the running the ministries as it is easy for them to shift the blame to others.
It’s once again a failure of the regulatory authority like CAAB as they have failed to enforce the safety regulation. The private airlines should also think about passengers’ safety. Pilots alleged in March of this year that certain officials of Civil Aviation could be bought off by the private airlines — if true it is a most serious allegation which needs to be promptly addressed.
But the nature of our government is that it has no responsibility to perform its own duty. Everybody is busy in making money. This situation must end. Public servants must serve the people or go.
