Originally Posted by
Heathrow Harry
Paywalled.. and I'm on the road but they regularly pick up stories from this site...
Could well be the case here:
Kathmandu crash pilots confused runway codes
Charles Bremner
March 14 2018, 12:01am
The Times
There was confusion among disoriented pilots and stressed air traffic controllers in the moments before the crash of a Bangladeshi aircraft in Nepal on Monday with the loss of 49 lives.
Kathmandu airport and US-Bangla Airways blamed each other for the events that caused the Bombardier Dash 8 turboprop aircraft to plunge into a field just off the mountain-ringed single runway on the edge of the Nepalese capital. The four crew died but 22 passengers survived by escaping the burning wreckage.
Recordings of six minutes of radio conversations between the pilots and the control tower showed deep confusion over which direction the airliner was to land in as it approached and began circling on a flight from Dhaka. Captain Abid Sultan and Prithula Rashid, the first officer, were cleared to land from the south on runway 02 but controllers told them “you are going towards runway 20”, approaching the strip from the opposite end.
“Do not turn towards runway 20, turn right,” the controller said. The pilots were nevertheless cleared to land on 20, then seemed to be heading back for 02. The controllers, who were dealing with several other aircraft, displayed confusion over the instructions they were giving. When the airliner appeared low over the airport unaligned with any runway, a controller barked: “I say again, turn!”
On the same frequency a voice in Nepali said: “They appear to be extremely disoriented. Looks like they are really confused.” It was not clear whether the speaker was a pilot or a controller.
The Canadian-made jet came down just after flying over the control tower in a turn as the pilots apparently manoeuvred to start a new approach. Passengers reported a sharp turn just before the crash.
“I had asked the air hostess, what is happening, is everything fine?’ She gave a thumbs up, but I could see she was panicking,” said Ashish Ranjit, 35, who escaped through a window on the aircraft’s right. “It was so low and it took such sharp turns.”
Imran Asif, chief executive of the airline, said: “We suspect wrong signals from Kathmandu air traffic control room might have led to the crash.”
Captain Sultan was a highly experienced pilot who had landed more than 100 times at Kathmandu, it said.
Raj Kumar Chetri, general manager of the airport, said: “The tower repeatedly asked if the pilot was OK and the reply was ‘Yes’.”