Missing Afghan Plane May Have Crashed, Official Says

KABUL (Reuters) - NATO troops and helicopters searched on Friday for an Afghan airliner missing for a day with 104 people on board, including 13 foreigners, amid fears it may have crashed after being turned away from Kabul in a snow storm.

NATO-led peacekeepers were conducting ground and air searches to the southeast of Kabul for the Boeing 737 belonging to private Kam Air, a spokesman said.

Seven of the 96 passengers were foreigners and six of the eight crew members were from Kyrgyzstan, Kam Air deputy director Feda Mohammed Fedayi said.

The foreigners aboard included three American women working for a Massachusetts-based company, Management Sciences for Health, its Kabul representative William Schiffbauer said.

The aircraft was on a flight from the western city of Herat to Kabul on Thursday when it went missing after being turned away from Kabul airport due to a snow storm, officials said.

"So far we have no report that the plane has landed anywhere," Shah Mahmoud Miakhel, a deputy interior minister, told Reuters. "It did not have so much fuel to enable it to fly far, so it may have crashed."

A Kam Air official declined to comment on this, but said peacekeepers from the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) had launched a search around the capital for a possible crash site.

"We have launched an air and ground search to the southeast of Kabul as that was the area the plane was heard of last, but that does not mean the plane has crashed," said ISAF spokesman Commander Ken McKillop.

Afghan Transport Minister Enayatullah Qasimi said authorities had been in touch with airports inside Afghanistan and in neighboring countries, but the plane had not landed there.

Kam Air's financial controller said the aircraft had contacted Peshawar airport in northwestern Pakistan about an hour after it was turned away from Kabul at about 4:00 p.m. (6:30 a.m. EST) on Thursday because of heavy snow that had closed the airport. It was given clearance to land, but it never arrived," Kamgar told Reuters. Pakistani aviation officials said the plane had never made contact.

Afghan authorities contacted Pakistan at about 16:50 p.m. Pakistan time (6:50 a.m. EST) regarding the missing aircraft, but it had not entered Pakistani air space, said Jehangir Khan, operations director of Pakistan's Civil Aviation Authority.

"I can confirm that no request was ever made by any captain of any Afghan aircraft to land at any airport in Pakistan," he said. "No Afghan aircraft has entered our airspace, we have also checked with defense authorities and all said no plane entered."

Kam Air opened as Afghanistan's only private airline in November 2003. It flies leased aircraft between Kabul and Dubai and Istanbul and operates several domestic routes.

In September, an Antonov-24 operated by the airline slewed off the runway while landing in Kabul, slightly injuring some of the 27 passengers aboard, apparently after engine trouble.

In early 1998, 51 people died when an Antonov transport plane operated by state-run Ariana Afghan Airlines crashed in mountains near the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta after failing to land inside Afghanistan because of bad weather.

In March that year, 45 people were killed when another Ariana plane, a Boeing 727, slammed into a mountain peak near Kabul.

In the most recent air crash in Afghanistan, three U.S. military personnel and three civilian crew were killed when a U.S. transport aircraft crashed in central mountains in November.

NBC reporting the remains of plane has been found..no details yet

2 posted on 02/04/2005 4:04:47 AM PST by sure_fine (*not one to over kill the thought process*)

More discussion of the crash here.

http://www.pprune.org/forums/showthread.php?s=3a576bee5a711379745d421904271d59&threadid=161944

This flight has been a mystery as it has been reported safe on the ground at Peshawar. That story was subsequently retracted and now it seems confirmed as having crashed. Apparently weather was bad everywhere at that time. The plane probably shouldn't have dispatched or should have been carrying a lot more fuel.

Freak conditions

Kam Air's owner, Mohammad Zamary Kamgar, told the BBC it had been cleared for take-off from Herat in the early afternoon.

"Kabul and the surrounding area have been hit by freak snowstorms, with almost 10 cm of snow falling in the past six hours. Flights out of Kabul have been suspended".

I think that works out to about 3 or 4 inches of snow. It doesn't seem like much.

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