Pilot error may have caused Yichun crash
Pilot error may have caused the fatal crash in Yichun city, Heilongjiang province on August 24, according to a top aviation official.
Li Jiaxiang , chief of the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC), told aviation officials at an internal meeting on August 26 that the crash location suggested the 40-year-old pilot had made a 'low-level mistake', China Business reported.
The Brazilian-built Embraer E-190 Henan Airlines aircraft landed 1,200 metres short of the runway at Lindu airport in poor visibility, and broke in half and burst into flames, killing 42 of the 96 people on board.
Mainland authorities have yet to announce the cause of the first fatal civil aviation accident since 2004, but the newspaper said aviation officials at the internal meeting raised questions about the skills and credentials of the pilot.
The newspaper is published under the auspices of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Li asked why the pilot tried to land the plane even though he could not see the lights of the runway.
'For night flights to land, [the pilot] should at least look for the runway end lights or the plane will landed outside the airport ...When the pilot [was] landing this plane, he had not even met the basic requirement, followed the basic rules and he had not even made the basic judgment,' Li was quoted as telling the meeting.
The aircraft was at treetop level 1 kilometre away from the crash location, Li said.
The report also quoted officials present at the internal meeting as saying visibility at the airport was not suitable for landing from 9.13pm. The plane crashed at 9.40pm.
Although preliminary investigations showed that the control tower was not responsible for the crash, Li said it should have warned the pilot.
The meeting also examined the qualifications of the pilot, Qi Quanjun, who was a military pilot flying J-6 fighter jets before he became a civilian pilot seven years ago.
The report quoted a senior CAAC official as alleging Qi was denied a rating to fly Boeing 737s by Shenzhen Airlines, which owns Henan Airlines, though he was later rated to fly the E-190.
Qi began to fly the E-190 in July last year. The report said the crash occurred on Qi's first time flying the route from Harbin to Yichun.
The flight, VD 8389, only began to be operated on August 10, two weeks before the crash.
The report said Henan Airlines only had one aircraft in Heilongjiang province and it had to fly 10 flights everyday from 8am to 11pm between different airports in the province. Before the plane crashed, Qi had already flown four trips that day.
Regional airports and airlines have mushroomed in recent years, and many have questioned whether personnel and hardware can sustain such rapid expansion.
Henan's government revoked the airline's permission to use the province's name after the crash.
The airline, now called Kunpeng, is owned by Shenzhen Airlines, which is owned by Air China.
