KARACHI:
A London-bound Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) plane carrying 168 passengers and crew on board, landed safely at Karachi’s Jinnah International Airport on Sunday after one of its two engines reportedly caught fire.
Airbus-310 took off from Karachi airport at 11:25am but it came back for landing when its pilot informed the control tower of serious problems in one of its engines. The aircraft landed at 12:20, after being airborne for only 55 minutes, a PIA spokesperson told The Express Tribune.
“The aircraft developed a technical fault during the flight,” the spokesperson, Sultan Hasan, added. “This is not unusual, it happens in every part of the world.” The PIA spokesperson denied that the engine caught fire and said that all such media reports were false.
Soon after the incident, the national flag carrier announced that it would shift the stranded passengers to another aircraft.
A spokesperson for the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) said the aircraft’s landing was normal and no passenger was hurt. The pilot took the right decision to come back to Karachi because it was a long flight of seven to eight hours, the CAA spokesperson, Pervez George, added.
He said that emergency vehicles and equipment for the landing had been deployed in a timely manner, but at the end, the pilot landed safely and without any difficulty.
Aviation experts say modern aircraft, even when one engine stop working, can land safely as appears to have happened with the Airbus-310 on Sunday.
Published in The Express Tribune, November 19th, 2012.
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