Pilots did best to save doomed jet

Press, 17 October 1986, Page 6

Pilots did best to save doomed jet

NZPA-Reuter New Delhi An official inquiry into the crash of an Air India jumbo off Ireland last year showed the pilots did their best to save the plane even after a blast crippled its emergency systems, the Press Trust of India (P.T.1.) reported yesterday. The news agency said a report by Delhi High Court Judge, B.N. Kirpal, found that the blast might have damaged the plane’s oxygen stream and cut off air to the pilots, who had donned oxygen masks. The Kirpal report into the crash, in June, 1985, which killed all 329 people aboard, has not been made public. But P.T.I. said it had obtained the latest excerpts from sources in the Ministry of Civil Aviation. According to P.T.1., Judge Kirpal said examination of the wreckage recovered from the Atlantic showed that the pilots, H.S. Narendra and S.S. Bhinder, had deployed the plane’s indicating they had made preparations for an emergency landing.

“The time of useful consciousnesss at 31,000 feet would be significantly less than 30 seconds under high stress and if the pilots became unconscious as a result, the aircraft would have gone out of control which would explain the subsequent events,” the news agency quoted the report as saying. Judge Kirpal was reported to have said in a 200-page section of the report submitted to the Indian Government last February that the crash was caused by a bomb planted in the aircraft’s forward cargo hold.