AIR CRASH IN BANGALORE OF FEBRUARY 1990

There was an air crash in Bangalore flight 605 of Indian Airlines from Bombay to Bangalore on the 14th of February 1990. What a tragic day and for many weeks thereafter the city reverberated under its shock.

Bangalore for all practical purposes before the said date had a clear air record at least on the passenger aircraft front.There was no incident where-in a plane taking off from Bangalore or any plane coming in missed the destination. Cities like Chennai madras and Bombay Mumbai have had air accidents- but not Bangalore. There were stray incidents of may be small planes like the HF 24 crashing in the out skirts on some trial mission.

What happened was this.  Bombay -Bangalore flight 605 took off from Bombay at around 12;00 noon and scheduled to land at Bangalore at around 1:20 PM. It was an A320 jet with fly by wire technology commanded by S S Gopujkar and his accomplice. It possibly had its co-ordinates of Bangalore Airport wrongly fed...and the plane instead of landing on the runway foreclosed and landed some 150 meters from the wall of the Airport adjacent to the military lawns after mowing down a cow...by the time the pilot switched off the fly by wire and took manual control it was too late and there is zero possibility of the plane taking off again...the plane rammed though the ground on the hot afternoon ripping the wheels apart and screeching the belly for many meters and the fuel going up in flames and 92 of the 154 passengers charred ..and for the timely intervention of the Air-hostess who flung the back door open the rest jumped to safety and the tragedy of the situation being that the plane burnt and at the hostile and uninhabited terrain the fire engines could never approach and what followed was bizarre and horrific least said.

I deliberately refrain from putting any picture of this incident owing to the malady it can create and note that one of the Birla scions were on board and possibly sitting in the Business class was early to be consumed. What a tragedy  ? I was at the BPL plant in Koramangala that afternoon and was one of the early recipients of this news.

Sadly a nearly similar incident gripped   Mangalore Airport few years ago.

Some serious thoughts must go into Aircraft design. The fuselage assuming it is the fuel container..I am no aviation expert........must be covered with a sizeable layer of some fire extinguisher material which will be unleashed on impact to nuetralize any fire that is created by friction..this would create a weight penalty on take-off and alter dynamics but it will save lives. How and in what matter it could be executed must be thought of by manufacturing experts. Fire must be mitigated and intrinsically quenched. Airports could have a helicopter handy with fire extinguishing apparatus which could be pressed into use in instances like this when there are terrestrial hindrances