Prayers for plane crash victims as teams investigate
Buddhist monks chanted prayers this morning over the wreckage of a plane crash that killed 89 people on Thailand’s resort island of Phuket, including a 23-year-old Derry man.
Investigators are meanwhile intensifying their examination into the role wind shear may have played in the accident.
A senior aviation official said the pilot of the doomed One-Two-Go Airlines flight OG268 Areef Mulyadi pilot had been warned of a treacherous wind shear at the airport, but he decided to land anyway.
Wind shear – a sudden change in either wind speed or direction in an aircraft’s flight path – can destabilise a plane, as pilots compensate for the condition, which can then suddenly disappear and put the aircraft out of control.
There were 123 passengers and seven crew members aboard the plane when it crashed on Sunday and caught fire while apparently trying to abort a landing at Phuket airport.
The pilot and co-pilot were among the five crew members killed. According to a transcript of the conversation between the control tower and the plane, ground officials informed the Indonesian pilot Mulyadi about wind shear, the Air Transport Department’s director-general, Chaisak Ungsuwan, told reporters yesterday. “The last word the pilot said was ’landing’,” he said.
While it is too early to definitively say what caused the crash, Kajit Habnanonda, president of Orient-Thai Airlines, which owns One-Two-Go, also singled out wind shear as a possible factor.
Transport Minister Theera Haocharoen cautioned, however, that the investigation was still on-going.
“The officials have found the black boxes and will send them for analysis to the United States,” he said, after the two flight data recorders were retrieved early Monday. “Hopefully, we will learn in a few weeks the cause of the accident.”
The 89 dead came from at least 10 countries, including Ireland, Britain, the US, Australia, France, Germany, Iran, Israel, Sweden and Thailand.
Officials said all but two bodies have been identified but they were still trying to determine the nationalities.
Forty-one passengers survived the crash.
Passengers and officials said the accident occurred when the pilot, manoeuvring in heavy tropical rain and wind, tried to abort his landing and pull up for a second attempt.
The aircraft lurched up, then down, hitting the tarmac hard. The passengers recounted how the plane skidded off the runway, breaking up and catching fire as it ploughed through a short retaining wall.
Survivors recounted horrifying scenes of passengers on fire and others who struggled to escape a cabin quickly filling with smoke.
“I think he realised the runway was too close or he was too fast or the wind had hit him,” survivor Australian Robert Borland said.
“He accelerated and tried to pull out. I thought he is going around again and the next thought was everything went black and there was a big mess and we hit the ground.”
Early today, monks, Muslim imams and a Catholic priest gathered at the airport to honour the dead amid the roar of planes taking off.
About a dozen monks – dressed in orange robes – chanted prayers near a pile of plane wreckage covered with netting.
They then strung a white robe from the debris to a building where the bodies were being housed – to help the souls find their way the next life.
No survivors nor relatives of the dead attended the 15-minute ceremony.
“In this case, many foreigners have passed away from this accident,” said Peter Bancha, a Catholic priest living in Phuket. “We had to come and pray for their souls because this will save their souls.”
