LAHORE, March 27: Pilot’s error was the ‘sole’ cause of the crash of a PIA Fokker in Multan about two years ago, according to the report of an investigation jointly carried out by the Civil Aviation Authority and experts from five other countries.

Forty-one passengers — including two judges of the Lahore High Court, a former principal of the King Edward Medical College, and four crew members — died when the Lahore-bound Fokker (F-27) crashed soon after take-off from the Multan airport on July 10, 2006.

A CAA official told Dawn on Thursday that the authority had submitted the report to the defence ministry last year but it had not been made public. “The CAA can only make it public when the ministry allows it,” he said.

The investigation team led by Air Commodore Junaid Amin and comprising Wing Commander Nasim Ahmed and PIA’s Captain Dara Shah Nawaz had carried out the probe with the help of experts from the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany and Netherlands.

According to the report, the crash was the result of a human error and not of any technical fault. “One of the two engines of the 40-year-old plane had stopped working at the time of take-off.

The pilot could easily have managed to handle the situation and safely landed the aircraft but he got confused and ‘forgot’ to pull up the landing gears within an altitude of 400 feet that eventually resulted in its crash,” he quoted the report as stating. The plane crashed one minute and 12 seconds after take-off.

Under International Civil Aviation Organisation (Icao) rules, it is mandatory on the CAA to make public findings of investigations into aircraft crashes.

Sources said the government had not shared the report with the countries which had helped in the investigation.

“Icao rules also require that a member country should submit the findings about a crash to the other members it takes on board during the investigation,” they said.

The government had grounded the whole Fokker fleet after the accident.