The aircraft that crashed near Ranchi, killing all seven people on board, was a 39-year-old Beechcraft aircraft with over 6,600 flying hours, officials aware of the matter told HT.
The seven-seater aircraft crashed in Jharkhand’s Chatra district on the night of February 23 while operating a medical evacuation flight from Ranchi to Delhi.
Those killed included patient Sanjay Kumar, 41; a doctor; a paramedic; two attendants; pilot-in-command Vivek Vikash Bhagat, who had around 1,400 hours of flying experience; and first officer Savrajdeep Singh, who had around 450 hours.
“Redbird Airways operated the aircraft, a Beechcraft C90A (King Air) twin-turboprop registered VT-AJV, which was manufactured in 1987 and had accumulated around 6,610 hours of airframe time at the time of the accident,” an official said. The official added that as per these stats, the plane wasn’t overused.
“It was powered by P&W PT6A-21 engines and had logged around 2,900 hours on the left engine and 2,800 hours on the right engine,” he added.
“Both propellers had completed around 2,500 hours each, and its latest Airworthiness Review Certificate (ARC) was issued on January 21 this year and was valid for a year,” another official said.
The aircraft departed Birsa Munda Airport in Ranchi at around 7:11 pm for Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA).
According to a second official, the crew sought a weather deviation shortly after take-off.
“Communication and radar contact were lost approximately 23 minutes after departure. The aircraft later crashed in a forested area near Simaria in Chatra district,” he said.
The crashed aircraft’s maximum take-off weight was 4,583 kg, and it did not have a black box, i.e., it did not have a cockpit voice recorder (CVR) or a digital flight data recorder (DFDR).
“In this aircraft, a CVR and FDR were not installed as per CAR (Civil Aviation Requirements). The first Certificate of Airworthiness (C of A) for the aircraft was issued in 1987. There was no mandatory regulatory requirement for installation of a CVR or FDR at the time of its original certification,” another official said.
The regulation provision for FDR, as per CAR (Section 2, Series I, Part V, para 4.1.2), which pertains to general aviation planes, states: “All multi-engined turbine-powered aeroplanes of a maximum certificated take-off mass of 5,700 kg or less for which the individual Certificate of Airworthiness is first issued on or after January 1, 1990, should be equipped with an FDR that records at least the first 16 parameters listed in Table 1 of Appendix I.”
To be sure, in CARs, ‘shall’ implies a mandate, while ‘should’ is optional.
