Ghatkopar plane crash: Families of victims blame aviation company for accident, demand investigation
Pilot Maria Kuber’s husband said UY Aviation ‘disregarded their responsibility’ to check if the plane was fit to go off the ground.
The families of three people killed in a plane crash in Mumbai’s Ghatkopar have blamed the aviation company for the deaths and demanded an investigation, PTI reported on Friday. Five people, including a pedestrian, were killed after the small chartered plane crash-landed in on Thursday afternoon.
The postmortem report of the five people highlighted ‘shock due to burn and poly-trauma’ as the cause of death, reported ANI.
Pilot Maria Kuber’s husband Prabhat Kathuria said his wife had mentioned to him that weather conditions were not conducive for a test flight to be conducted for a small plane like Beechcraft King Air C90 aircraft. He said norms of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation do not permit test flights of small planes in rainy weather, and asked who authorised the aircraft to take off in the first place.
Kathuria said that co-pilot Pradeep Rajput shared the same view. “She [Maria] was sure that the permission to undertake such a flight would not be given,” Kathuria said in a statement issued on Friday.
“The company involved in the plane’s repairs seems to have been incapable of detecting the technical snags that could have led to its crash,” Kathuria said.
Kathuria questioned if the aircraft was fit to fly and said that UY Aviation, who owned the aircraft, “seem to have completely disregarded their responsibility to check whether such a plane should go off the ground”.
Another victim maintenance engineer Surabhi Gupta’s father SP Gupta said his daughter had told him over the phone on Thursday that the aircraft “was in a bad condition”.
Co-pilot Pradeep Rajput’s family have called for a thorough investigation. “The agencies need to probe if all safety protocols that are supposed to be in place before a plane goes on test flight were followed,” said Rajput’s cousin TS Pandori, according to The Times of India.