Trainee pilot killed as aircraft crashes.
A female trainee pilot of a private flying academy was killed and her trainer sustained critical injuries after their small aircraft crashed and caught fire a while after it took off at Shah Makhdum Airport in Rajshahi on Wednesday, the airport officials said. Tamanna Rahman Hridi, 22, died of burn injures on the spot while the trainer, Shahed Kamal, a retired military aviator of Bangladesh Flying Academy and General Aviation, was given an airlift to the Combined Military Hospital in Dhaka. The Civil Aviation Authorities, Bangladesh officials said the training craft, Cessna-152, crash-landed about 2:00pm few minutes after it took off with the two pilots.
The US-build aircraft skidded off the runway and caught fire. Trainer Kamal managed to get out of the cockpit while Tamanna got trapped. ‘The aircraft caught fire after it crashed, leaving one of its pilots dead,’ the airport manager, Shatafur Rahman, told New Age. ‘We recovered her charred body from the double-seater aircraft while the trainer was evacuated,’ fire service and civil defence senior station officer Shafirul Islam told New Age. They found the badly damaged aircraft near the runway and the front of the craft was found completely burnt. ‘The airport authorities did not inform us, rather we rushed there seeing the news on television few minutes after the accident,’ he added. Tamanna was declared dead on the spot while Kamal was rushed to Rajshahi Medical College Hospital. BFAGA secretary general captain Ahmed Fazlur Rahman, however, told New Age the pilots of Rajshahi-based training aircraft found a technical glitch and tried to make an emergency landing. ‘The investigation will reveal whether it crashed after catching fire or before it tried to land,’ he said. Ahmed said the trainer was badly burnt and flown to the Dhaka CMH. ‘This is really unfortunate for the academy,’ the official said.
A CAAB official told New Age that a probe body, led by CAAB director (flight safety and regulation) Group Captain SM Nazmul Anam, was instituted to investigate the incident and it already started working. The academy officials said Tamanna Rahman of Tangail was daughter of physician Anisur Rahman, who lives at Nikunja-2 in Dhaka. After post-mortem examination, her body was brought to Dhaka for handover to the family. Tamanna got admission in the flying academy in 2013 and her course was scheduled to finish by 2016. It could not be confirmed how many hours she flew for the Bangladesh Flying Academy and General Aviation, one of the five leading flying academies in the country, established in 1948. Earlier, on September 27, 1998, another Cessna 150 of Parabat Airlines crashed at Postagola in Dhaka due to technical fault, leaving its pilot Faria Lara and co-pilot Rafiqul dead. According to the media report, another Cessna 152 (S2-ABI) of Bangladesh Flying Academy crash-landed at Shah Makhdum Airport on April 25, 2013 and the aircraft flipped upside-down, the flight instructor and trainee pilot inside escaped with minor injuries.
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