The plane that crashed near Ranchi, killing all seven people on board, was a 39-year-old Beechcraft with more than 6,600 flight hours, officials familiar with the matter told HT.
The seven-seater plane crashed in Jharkhand’s Chatra district on the night of February 23 while on a medical evacuation flight from Ranchi to Delhi.
Among the dead were patient Sanjay Kumar, 41; doctor; Two paramedics are present. Pilot Vivek Vikash Bhagat, who has 1,400 hours of flying experience; and First Officer Savrajdeep Singh, who had about 450 hours.
“Redbird Airlines operated the aircraft, a Beechcraft C90A (King Air) twin-turboprop, registered VT-AJV, which was manufactured in 1987 and had accumulated approximately 6,610 hours of airframe time at the time of the accident,” an official said. The official added that according to these statistics, the plane was not overused.
“It was powered by P&W PT6A-21 engines and logged approximately 2,900 hours on the left engine and 2,800 hours on the right engine,” he added.
“The two helicopters have completed around 2,500 hours each and the last Airworthiness Review Certificate (ARC) was issued on January 21 this year and was valid for a year,” another official said.
The plane departed Ranchi’s Birsa Munda airport at around 7:11 pm for Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA).
According to a second official, the crew sought a change in weather shortly after takeoff.
“Contact and radar were lost about 23 minutes after departure. The plane later crashed in a forest area near Semaria in Chatra district,” he added.
The maximum take-off weight of the crashed aircraft was 4,583 kg, and it did not have a black box, that is, it did not have a cockpit voice recorder (CVR) or digital flight data recorder (DFDR).
“In this aircraft, the CVR and FDR were not fitted as per civil aviation requirements. The first certificate of airworthiness (C of A) for the aircraft was issued in 1987. There were no mandatory regulatory requirements for fitting of CVR or FDR at the time of its original certification,” another official said.
The regulatory provision for the FDR, in accordance with the CAR (Section 2, Series I, Part V, Paragraph 4.1.2), which relates to general aviation aircraft, states: “All multi-engine turboprop aircraft with a maximum certified take-off mass of 5,700 kg or less and for which an individual certificate of airworthiness was first issued on or after 1 January 1990 must be equipped with an FDR recording at least the first 16 parameters listed.” In Table 1 of Appendix I.
The word “shall” in CAR certainly means a mandate, while the word “should” is optional.
