Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Feb 24: All the seven occupants of an air ambulance including the patient who was being rushed to Delhi to save his life, were killed in an air crash in the forests of Chatra in Jharkhand, the police said on Tuesday.
The 41-year old Sanjay Kumar had suffered 63% burn in an accidental fire. His desperate family pooled in all their resources to raise Rs eight lakhs for an air ambulance to fly him from Ranchi to New Delhi.
The flight was expected to take little over an hour so besides his immediate family members, a physician and a paramedic were also travelling in the flight to keep Sanjay Kumar’s condition stable. But the race against the time ended in just about 23 minutes after the Beechcraft King Air C90 air ambulance crashed in Chatra forests. The crash killed the patient Kumar, his wife, Archana Devi, relative Dhuru Kumar, physician Vikas Kumar Gupta, paramedic Sachin Kumar Mishra, and captains Vivek Vikas Bhagat and Savrajdeep Singh.
“Not just one, many families have been ruined,” said a relative of Kumar at Chatra Sadar Hospital morgue where the bodies were kept for post-mortem. “If proper treatment had been available in Ranchi, we would not have had to take him to Delhi.”
Bajrangi Prasad, the father of Gupta, who was assigned to keep Kumar stable during the flight, recounted the sacrifices he made for his son’s education. “He has a seven-year-old son… I sold my farmland to educate him,” Prasad said. “He told me he was going to Delhi with a patient, but soon I learned the aircraft had crashed and my son is no more.”
The residents of nearby villages were the first to reach the crash site after hearing a loud sound and seeing a flash of light. They tracked four kilometres through the forests to locate the crashed aircraft. Rescuers retrieved the bodies overnight and brought them to the Chatra Sadar Hospital.
The crash was the latest safety crisis to hit India’s aviation sector. Delhi-based Redbird Airways operated the Beechcraft C90 aircraft, which took off from Ranchi at 7:11pm. Aviation regulator Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) said the aircraft established contact with Kolkata air traffic control at 7:34pm, before losing communication, radar contact, and going down.
Redbird Airways received its permit to serve non-scheduled flights in 2019, according to its website. According to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) website, the fleet had six planes, including the one that crashed. The crash intensified the scrutiny of chartered jet operators and the regulatory framework governing them. It came days after the Maharashtra deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar and four others were killed in the crash involving a Learjet 45 aircraft in Maharashtra’s Baramati on January 28. The crash sparked calls for an independent probe.
The DGCA had announced special audits of all non-scheduled operators, but the reports have not been released.
The Jharkhand crash was the third such civilian aviation incident since June last year, when an Air India Boeing Dreamliner crashed shortly after take-off from the Ahmedabad airport. The final report on the crash is yet to be released. Ranchi airport director Vinod Kumar said inclement weather could be a reason behind the Jharkhand crash, but the actual cause will be determined after an investigation. Investigators were probing whether severe weather or a technical snag caused the crash.