Pakistan Air Crash Blamed on Poor Visibilty, Pilot Error
By ANDY PASZTOR
An international team of safety experts believes poor visibility and pilot navigation slipups likely caused last month's crash of a Pakistani airliner that killed 152 people on approach to Islamabad, aviation-industry officials said.
The Airbus A321 operated by Airblue Ltd. was en route from Karachi when it flew into heavily forested hills as it was circling to land at the Islamabad airport in fog and rain. Preliminary information retrieved from the plane's flight-data recorder, according to officials familiar with the details, indicates that its engines, flight-control systems and other onboard equipment operated normally before impact.
Readouts of the recovered "black box," these officials said, also indicate that the cockpit crew at the last moment may have realized the jetliner was on a collision course with the slope and apparently tried to climb out of danger. The plane impacted near a ridge of the Margalla Hills. Early reports indicated that many flights into Islamabad had been cancelled or diverted that morning due to poor visibility, but some eyewitnesses said the weather improved somewhat before the Airblue plane's approach.
While the Islamabad probe is far from finished and no determination s have been made, Airbus last week gave the strongest signal yet that it essentially has ruled out aircraft malfunction as a probable cause of the crash
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