High Anxiety: Nawaz’s plane makes emergency landing

LAHORE:

PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif had a close call when an aircraft he was travelling in was forced to make an emergency landing on Friday.

Sharif was flying from Quetta to Bahawalpur’s Hasilpur district, where he was scheduled to address a public gathering, when a crack developed in the plane’s windshield and the pilot was forced to make an emergency landing at Lahore’s Allama Iqbal International Airport.

The plane was flying at an altitude of 35,000 feet when the first of the three layers of the windshield cracked. The pilot immediately lowered the plane to 9,000 feet before landing it on the runway at the Lahore airport.

This was the second time in four days that Sharif had bad luck with aviation. On April 16 he, along with his team, was on board a helicopter flying to Hafizabad, but due to a lack of communication between the pilot and the ground staff, the helicopter could not find the landing location and remained airborne for an extra 30 minutes.

Sources in the PML-N said that the ground staff had not cooperated with the pilot and had in fact misled him. They say the party is taking these incidents seriously and plans to investigate them to see if there is foul play involved.

In the case of the airplane incident, they said that it is the responsibility of the Civil Aviation Authority to check the plane before it took off.

However, PML-N’s senior leader Senator Pervez Rashid, while talking to The Express Tribune, said that both incidents were simply coincidences. He said that the Hafizabad incident was a result of a miscommunication while Friday’s incident was apparently a technical fault.

Both the helicopter and the aircraft have been rented by the PML-N to facilitate the campaigning of its leadership.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 20^th, 2013.