NAIA runway reopens hours after medevac plane accident
MANILA, Philippines — The runway of Manila’s international airport reopened early Monday, hours after a Tokyo-bound aircraft caught fire at 8 p.m. of Sunday, March 29.
News5 quoted Civil Aviation Authority Spokesperson Eric Apolonio as saying in a radio interview that the airport’s runway was re-opened at 5 a.m. and normal operations have since resumed.
This was after authorities have cleared debris of Lionair RPC5880 that caught fire as it was about to take off on a medical evacuation flight, killing eight people onboard.
The MIAA, in an advisory to reporters, has confirmed the accident, which it said happened at the end of the airport's Runway 24.
The runway closure affected a Korean Airlines flight that was diverted to Clark International Airport.
Investigation is ongoing. “We’re still trying to determine what [caused] the accident, it will take some time to complete it,” Apolinario was also quoted as saying.
"Immediately after the incident, the MIAA Fire and Rescue team were dispatched to the site to douse the flames with chemical foam," MIAA said in its advisory.
Aircraft that burned was ‘airworthy’
Captain Don Mendoza, CAAP Deputy Director General, in a late night briefing Sunday, said that the aircraft is deemed “airworthy.”
“Licenses of the pilots are current and it’s a Westwind aircraft. It’s a corporate jet performing a medevac from Manila to Haneda [Japan],” he said.
According to the Lionair website, its Westwind II can accommodate seven passengers in executive seats. It can also be configured as an air ambulance, with space for a patient, two or three members of a medical team, and one or two relatives.
Mendoza also confirmed that the aircraft was being used to transport medical supplies .
Lionair fleet may be grounded
In the same press conference, Mendoza said that they may order Lionair aircrafts grounded due to the incident.
He noted that Lionair was also the operator of the plane that crashed in Laguna, in September last year. All nine passengers and flight crew also perished from the incident.
“Right now the initial step that we are looking into at is grounding the whole fleet,” Mendoza said.
“We are looking into the records deeply of this unfortunate event that happened to Lionair,” he also said adding that the authorities will conduct a thorough investigation into the incident. — Kristine Joy Patag
Seven people have been tragically killed as their plane plummeted into a house in Bulacan.
Retrieval operation is ongoing.
FULL STORY: 7 dead as small plane crashes in Bulacan residential area
An Australian man was charged in Singapore on Saturday for making a bomb threat on board a Perth-bound plane that forced the aircraft to turn back under fighter jet escort.
Hawkins Kevin Francis, 30, faces up to 10 years in jail or a fine not exceeding Sg$500,000 ($356,000) or both on conviction.
Flight TR16 operated by Singapore budget carrier Scoot was forced to turn back to the city-state an hour into the journey on Thursday after the threat was made. — AFP
Airport officials say a flight from Panama to the United States made a u-turn Friday after the discovery of a suspicious package in the toilet that turned out to be... an adult diaper.
Panama's civil aviation authority at first announced the Copa flight between Panama City and Tampa, Florida, had to turn around due to a presumed "bomb threat."
Back on the tarmac, the plane was emptied of passengers and searched by a police explosives unit. — AFP
Officials say a US man who groped a sleeping passenger on a plane was jailed Thursday for nearly two years.
Mohammad Jawad Ansari, 50, put his hand on the inner thigh of a woman as she slept in the middle seat of a flight from Cleveland to Los Angeles in February 2020.
The victim, who was wearing a dress, woke up and pushed Ansari's hand away before leaving her seat and telling cabin crew about the assault. — AFP
Officials say 14 people were killed Saturday when a plane crashed in the Brazilian Amazon while trying to land in stormy weather in the tourist town of Barcelos, leaving no survivors.
The small plane's pilot was approaching the remote town in heavy rain, with low visibility, and appeared to inadvertently start landing halfway down the runway, Amazonas state security secretary Vinicius Almeida tells a news conference.
The plane ran out of landing strip and crashed, killing all 12 passengers and two crew, he says. — AFP
Malaysian air accident investigators are analyzing on Friday the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) of a light plane that crashed into a road near the capital, killing all eight people on board and two on the ground.
The Beechcraft Model 390 aircraft exploded into a fireball on impact when it crashed Thursday in Selangor state west of the capital Kuala Lumpur, with thick black smoke seen rising from the site, video clips from the scene showed.
All eight people on board -- six passengers and two flight crew -- as well as two motorists on the four-lane road were killed, police say. — AFP
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