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ISLAMABAD/KOHAT, Feb 21: As the nation mourned the death of the Pakistan Air Force chief and 16 others in Thursday’s plane crash, the government said on Friday it would publish an inquiry report on one of the country’s worst air tragedies.
The national flag flew at half-mast at public buildings across the country in mourning for Chief of Air Staff Air Chief Marshal Mushaf Ali Mir, his wife Bilqis and 15 others, including some senior PAF officers, while President Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali attended a funeral ceremony at the Chaklala air base near Islamabad.
Defence Minister Rao Sikandar Iqbal said the findings of the report of a high-powered inquiry board investigating Thursday morning’s crash of a PAF Fokker-27 in fog on a mountain near Kohat would be made public.
Every aspect of the accident would be explored and nothing would be concealed from the nation, he told reporters at the Chaklala funeral ceremony after remains of the dead were flown there from the crash site before being sent to their home towns for burial.
General Musharraf broke with tradition to deliver a eulogy, calling the dead air chief “a personal friend”.
“The loss which the Pakistan Air Force and the country have suffered is so great that I cannot prevent myself from speaking,” he said.
“All those officers and men including the air chief who laid their lives in the line of duty were the cream of the force,” he said.
The president described the air chief as “a brave man and a source of courage to others”.
The prayers were also attended by cabinet members, provincial governors, senior military officials and prominent politicians.
The bodies of Air Chief Marshal Mir and his wife were later flown to Lahore where they will be laid to rest on Saturday.
The PAF crash that killed all the 17 people on board — including two air vice-marshals — was the worst since the still unexplained August 17, 1988 crash of a C-130 transport near Bahawalpur that killed military president Gen Mohammad Ziaul Haq, two other army generals and the US ambassador to Pakistan.
Investigations into Thursday’s crash have started with the visit of investigators to the crash site, where one of the plane’s two flight recorders, or black boxes, have been found, officials of the PAF’s public relations directorate said.
The board of inquiry set up by the government on Thursday is headed by Air Vice-Marshal Khalid Chaudhry and has two other officers from the PAF’s operations and technical sections.
PAF officials said the board’s composition was not static and could be expanded as the probe proceeded. “More members may be inducted as and when required depending on the direction the probe takes,” an official said.
He said service rules and procedures would be followed during the investigations.
Senior PAF officials are for the time being ruling out sabotage as a cause of the crash and say initial investigations will focus on inclement weather, any possible pilot error, and technical reasons.
In another development that may be linked to the crash probe, a C-130 carrying some senior US air force officials left Chaklala for Peshawar, from where they could travel to the crash site near Kohat.
BLACK BOX FOUND: Official sources in Kohat said the black box found by the army’s Koh Paima (mountaineering) unit, which was called to evacuate the bodies from the crashed Fokker’s debris, had been handed over to a technical team investigating the incident.
Debris scattered over a 150 square feet area on top of the Taulanj mountain was being collected by the investigating special unit, a senior military officer in charge of the rescue operation told Dawn.
The black box will help experts know the height, position, and speed of the plane before the crash and the last SOS, if any, sent by the pilot to the nearest air control tower.
A highly placed military source in Kohat quoted a preliminary inquiry report as saying the Fokker was chosen for Thursday’s flight because larger C-130s, usually used in such tours by dignitaries, had been experiencing trouble in takeoffs from the Kohat air base in the past because of its short runway.
The report said helicopters, which could be the second best option for a flight in a hilly region, were not used in the tour for unknown reasons.
A source close to the inquiry told Dawn on Thursday night that the late Air Vice-Marshal Abdul Razzaq, who was one of those killed in the crash, had flown to Kohat last month by the much smaller Cessna to attend a passing-out parade.
He said the importance of Kohat airport, built during British rule, had increased considerably during and after the Afghan war and a plan was under consideration to shift it to a new site in Jarma where the air force owns 4,000 acres of land.
The source said the importance of Kohat airport was also realized when domestic and international flights were diverted to it from Islamabad immediately after the big blast of an ammunition dump at Ojhri camp in 1988.
The military has been finding it hard to transport arms and personnel to Kohat as they could not use C-130s regularly on this airport, the source said.
There was heavy fog at the time of the accident, and the pilot “might have lost the planned route due to technical problems experienced by the old aircraft,” the source said.
