Al-Qaeda suspect killed by Saudi police in shootout

Saudi security forces shot dead a suspected Al-Qaeda militant and arrested another after one of them opened fire at agents at a checkpoint on Friday, the interior ministry said.

One of the two men, who was disguised as a woman, opened fire after their car was stopped at the checkpoint in the central town of Wadi al-Dawasir. We have a strong suspicion it is Al-Qaeda, but we are still trying to identify the dead man and questioning the detained suspect, a spokesman said. Saudi security forces have stepped up their campaign against Al-Qaeda after the Islamic militant groups’s Yemeni and Saudi wings merged in 2009 into a regional organisation, which claimed responsibility for the failed bombing of a US-bound passenger plane last Christmas.

Small passenger plane missing in Nepal

A small passenger plane carrying 22 people including one American went missing shortly after taking off from an airport in eastern Nepal on Wednesday, the airline and the civil aviation authority said.

Air traffic control said they lost contact with the pilot around 10 minutes after the Twin Otter plane took off from Lamidanda, a small airstrip around 140 kilometres (90 miles) east of the capital Kathmandu.

A passenger plane has gone missing in eastern Nepal. We have alerted the emergency services and a search and rescue effort is under way, Ram Prasad Neupane, head of the civil aviation authority.

Two helicopters flew to the remote area to try to locate the plane, which belongs to a small domestic airline, Tara Air, but the search operation had to be called off when night fell.

Sleepy pilot caused Indian passenger plane crash

MANGLORE: A sleepy pilot who approached the runway at the wrong angle and ignored warning signs was to blame for a passenger plane crash in southern India in May that claimed 158 lives, reports said Wednesday.

A Court of Inquiry probe concluded the Air India pilot Zlatko Glusica, from Serbia, was asleep for much of the three-hour flight and was “disorientated” when the plane started to descend, the Hindustan Times reported.

The low-cost Air India Express plane flying from Dubai to the city of Mangalore overshot the runway, plunged into a gorge and burst into flames. Eight people survived the inferno.

The official crash report, which has not been released publicly, was submitted to the civil aviation ministry on Tuesday.

Voice recordings picked up the co-pilot saying: “We don’t have runway left,” seconds before the disaster.

Most of the dead

Islamabad-bound flight in emergency landing at Karachi

KARACHI: A PIA passenger plane on Monday made emergency landing at Jinnah International Airport Karachi due to a reported fault in its engine, ARY NEWS reports.

Here is the original:
Islamabad-bound flight in emergency landing at Karachi

Afghan passenger plane crashes

A passenger plane carrying 42 people on an internal flight between Kabul and Kunduz has gone missing over a mountainous area of northern Afghanistan on Monday.
The Russian made AN-24 aircraft took off from Kunduz airport on Monday morning, but never arrived in Kabul. It apparently crashed in remote mountains between the two cities.
A police chief at Kabul airport said the jet crashed near the Salang Pass.

20 injured as Indonesian airplane skids off runway

JAKARTA: A passenger plane with about 100 people on board skidded off the end of an airport runway while landing in heavy rain Tuesday on Indonesia”s remote Papua province, injuring some 20 people, officials said.

The Boeing 737, operated by Merpati Nusantara Airline, was landing at Manokwari airport when it slid into a small canal at the end of the runway, police official Didi Zaenal said. He said the plane flew in from the nearby city of Sorong.

About 20 passengers, most with bruises and some with broken bones, were taken to a local hospital for treatment, paramedics and hospital officials said. There were no reports of fatalities.

Ethiopian Plane Crashes Near Beirut

TrendPK.com An Ethiopian passenger plane has plunged into the Mediterranean Sea after taking off in Lebanon during stormy weather.
Airport sources said that the plane was carrying 85 passengers, of which 50 were from Lebanon while majority of other passengers were citizens of Ethiopia.
“Ethiopian Airlines Flight 409 crashed about five minutes after takeoff [...]

Plane crash in Iran, 46 injured

TEHRAN, Iran – A Russian-made Iranian passenger plane carrying 157 passengers and 13 crew crash landed in northeastern Iran on Sunday injuring at least 46 people, state television reported.

The broadcast quoted Iran’s civil aviation spokesman, Reza Jafarzadeh, as saying that no one was killed in the accident. He gave no indication of what might have caused the accident.

The Taban Air plane caught fire upon landing at Mashhad airport at 7:20 a.m. local time (0350 GMT). The injured have been taken to hospitals in Mashhad, the report added.

Jafarzadeh said the Tupolev plane initially took off from Abadan airport in southwestern Iran Saturday evening but landed in Isfahan, central Iran, because of bad weather in Mashhad, its destination.

“The plane took off from Isfahan airport at 5:35 a.m. local time Sunday … Despite bad weather and minimum visibility, the pilot made an emergency landing because a passenger was ill. But the incident then happened during landing,” he said.

Jafarzadeh said the plane was seriously damaged. State television added that part of the aircraft had burned and the left wing and undercarriage were torn off.

Iran has about a dozen Soviet-built Tupolev airliners.

Iran has seen numerous crashes in recent years and its airlines have been plagued by maintenance problems, partly because they are chronically cashed-strapped and cannot buy new planes.

Iranian officials often blame U.S. sanctions that prevent it from refurbishing the American aircraft bought before the 1979 Islamic revolution and make it difficult to get spare parts or planes from Europe.

The country has come to rely on Russian aircraft, many of them Soviet-era planes that are harder to get parts for since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Last July, a Tupolev passenger plane carrying 168 people crashed shortly after takeoff, nose-diving into a field and killing all those aboard. The Caspian Airlines Tu-154M jet had taken off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport and was headed to the Armenian capital Yerevan.

In February 2006, another Tu-154 operated by Iran Airtour, which is affiliated with Iran’s national carrier, crashed during landing in Tehran, killing 29 of the 148 people on board. Another Airtour Tupolev crashed in 2002 in the mountains of western Iran, killing all 199 on board.

Iran’s worst crash came in February 2003 and also involved a Russian-made Ilyushin that plowed into the mountains of southeastern Iran, killing 302 people — mostly members of the elite Revolutionary Guard.

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Plane crash in Iran, 46 injured was first posted on January 24, 2010 at 8:09 pm.

Plane Crash lands in Iran, 46 Injured

TEHRAN: An Iranian passenger plane caught fire on Sunday as it was landing in the northeastern city of Mashhad, injuring at least 46 people on board, state television reported.

Iranian officials told local news networks that the rear end of the Russian-built Tupolev 154 plane belonging to Taban Airline caught fire as the aircraft was landing at Mashhad airport.

“The plane went off the runaway upon landing and part of its rear end broke away,” state television quoted as saying Javad Erfanian, head of disaster management of Khorasan Razavi province of which Mashhad is the capital.

“Forty-six people have been injured, but most of them are not serious.”

The English language state-owned television said the plane, traveling from Abadan located in southwest Iran to Mashhad, had 157 passengers on board. Erfanian said the plane also had 13 crew members on board.

Reza Jafarzadeh, spokesman of Iranian civil aviation, said the plane had left Abadan on Saturday, but bad weather in Mashhad led to the aircraft landing in the central city of Isfahan for the night before it took off again for Mashhad early Sunday.

“The captain had a critical patient on board and so had do an emergency landing (in Mashhad) which is why the aircraft met with an accident,” he was quoted as saying on the website of state television.

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Plane Crash lands in Iran, 46 Injured was first posted on January 24, 2010 at 11:39 am.