Families struggle to cope with Mangalore tragedy
Day three of the Mangalore airport plane tragedy turned out to be a frustrating one for teams of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and the police as efforts to recover the plane’s digital flight data recorder did not yield fruit. The only solace so far has been the recovery of the cockpit voice recorder which records conversations inside the cockpit and those with air traffic controllers.
A pall of gloom descended over the family of Mohammed Ismail who lost his life in the crash. “He is the youngest of us 10 siblings and we never knew this would be the fate of our younger brother,” said Abdul Aziz, brother of Mohammed Ismail. Ismail was working as a graphic designer in Dubai for last three years and was returning home for a vacation, he added.
Even as families struggled to cope with their loss, it was a bigger ordeal for those who couldn’t identify bodies of their relatives. “As the bodies have been charred beyond recognition, their DNA samples have been sent to Hyderabad to establish identification. After that we will hand over bodies to their relatives,” said a top government official from Dakshina Kannada district. There were instances in which a body was claimed by more than one family. One body was claimed by four families in Wenlock Hospital in Mangalore. One of them, Diana Fernandez claimed that the body was that of Ignis D’Souza, her brother-in-law. “Police have refused to hand over the body pending DNA verification,” Diana said.
Meanwhile, the eight surviviors of the crash believe they have been given a new lease of life. “We are thankful to God for saving his life but feel sad for families who lost their relatives,” said Saira D’Souza, a relative of a survivor Joel Prathap D’Souza. Joel Prathap D’Souza has minor injuries in the soft tissue and spinal cord and is now being treated in city-based KMC hospital.
The ill-fated Air India Express flight took the lives of 158 people including 19 children and four infants. It had taken off from Dubai and was due to land in Mangalore on Saturday morning. The state-of-the-art Boeing 737-800, which was inducted on January 15, 2008 and piloted by British national of Serbian origin Zlatko Glusica, and had 160 passengers and a six-member crew on board the budget carrier, flight IX-812.
While the exact cause of the accident will only be known after the recovery of the black box, aviation experts feel that while landing the plane, the pilot overshot the touchdown point by over 2,000 feet.