'Pilot Abid was mentally stressed'

Risingbd Desk : The pilot of the US-Bangla plane that crashed at Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport in March and killed 51 people appears to have lied to the control tower during the landing procedure.

Captain Abid Sultan was smoking continuously inside the cockpit during the one-hour flight from Dhaka to Kathmandu, the newspaper reported citing a government investigation report.

According to details of an official investigation led by the Nepal government, Abid Sultan was going through tremendous personal mental stress and anxiety, leading to a series of erroneous decisions on his part before the fatal crash of Flight BS 211.

Throughout the flight Sultan was behaving erratically in a departure from his usual temperament, which should have immediately raised red flags, Nepali investigators said in the report.

Six minutes before landing, Sultan confirmed that the plane’s landing gear was down and locked. “Gears down, three greens,” the pilot said, according to the report, referring to the electrical indicator lights inside the cockpit.

However, when co-pilot Prithula Rashid conducted a final landing checklist, the landing gears were not down. Minutes later, the plane carrying 67 passengers and four crew members burst into flames after missing the runway during its second landing attempt.

Only 20 passengers survived the crash.

Investigators say Sultan had been smoking cigarettes frequently during the hour-long flight from Dhaka to Kathmandu.

The former Bangladeshi Air Force pilot, who had clocked more than 5,500 flying hours, had not disclosed to the airlines that he was a smoker. An examination of his medical records found that he had made inconsistent reports of his smoking habits.

Investigators concluded that Sultan was undergoing severe mental stress inside the cockpit and also seemed to be fatigued and tired due to lack of sleep. “He was crying on several occasions,” the report said.

The report also shows that Rashid, the co-pilot, listened passively while Sultan made multiple abusive statements toward a female colleague, another co-pilot in the company who had questioned his reputation as an instructor.

Their relationship was a major topic of discussion throughout the flight, according to the report.

Details from the audio record show the pilot broke down and said that he was “very upset and hurt by the behaviour of his female colleague” and that “she was the only reason he was leaving the company”.

“A cockpit is a place where personal conversations between colleagues are strictly prohibited when the aircraft is preparing to land or take off,” said Captain Shrawan Rijal of Nepal Airlines.

The Sterile Cockpit Rule under the US Federal Aviation Administration regulation requires aircraft pilots to refrain from non-essential activities in the cockpit during critical phases of flight, normally below 10,000 feet.



On the day of the crash the US-Bangla flight had departed Dhaka’s Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport at 12:30pm. At 1:50pm the plane began its descent.

There was some confusion about where the plane would make its landing.

The airport tower cleared the plane to land at one point on the runway, but the flight seemed to be making for a separate point.

Local pilots monitoring the situation on the radar at the airport reportedly raised concerns that the US-Bangla pilots looked disoriented and lost.

According to the flight recording, the pilots seemed to have lost their situational awareness and were having difficulty locating the runway. They did not communicate this information to the tower.

The tower, which had cleared the flight to land at either of two points on the runway, cancelled the landing clearance when they sensed the confusion of the pilots.

At one point the aircraft flew as low as 45 feet above the ground, just over one of the airport’s terminal buildings.

According to the Kathmandu Post, Nepali airline officials were horrified to see the plane fly so close to the tower and had praised the pilot for avoiding it and half a dozen fuelled planes parked nearby.

The scene before the crash was ‘something like a war film’, according to airport officials inside the tower.

When the aircraft touched down only the right landing gear hit the runway and the plane skidded to crash and came to a halt on a nearby field.

A fire began within six seconds of the impact. According to the investigation commission, passengers had a high chance of survival because of the low impact, but had been trapped by the fire.

A former member of Bangladesh Air Force, Sultan joined US-Bangla in 2015 and had a history of depression, the report said. He had been removed from active duty by the Air Force after his psychiatric assessment in 1993, but was re-evaluated by a psychiatrist in 2002, and was declared fit for flying.

The report said that Sultan’s detail medical history was not reviewed by US-Bangla Airlines when he was hired. Kamrul Islam, the general manager and spokesperson for the US-Bangla Airlines, declined the Post’s request for comment.

bdnews24.com made several attempts to contact Islam for comment, but he could not be reached.

However, the report clarifies that Sultan did not exhibit any recurring mental issues during the medical examinations from 2002 to 2018.

“None of the medical reports that the committee reviewed from 2012 to 2017 mentioned any symptoms about depression,” the report said.

The Civil Aviation Authority of Bangladesh conducts annual medical checks on pilots.

But according to a senior aviation export who spoke to the Kathmandu Post, many pilots refuse treatment of mental health issues out of fear the assessment will negatively affect their career.

“Broken relationships, personality disorders, work stress, alcohol and drug problems all spell disaster,” the expert, who asked to stay anonymous, told the Kathmandu Post. “And they try to manage their depression themselves, without proper attention and treatment.”

Afsana Khanam, Abid Sultan’s wife, was hospitalised with a stroke after receiving the news of her husband’s death. She later died in hospital on Mar 23. The couple left behind a son, Tanzib Bin Sultan Mahi.

Source: The Kathmandu Post


risingbd/Dhaka/Aug 27, 2018/Nasim