‘Still a mystery why the plane landed from north-side of the runway’

It is still a mystery why the pilot of the US-Bangla airlines aircraft chose north-side of the runway to land at Kathmandu airport which led to a crash on March 12, the TIA general manager said today.

Everything was favorable on that day to land from the south-side of the runway, General Manager of TIA Rajkumar Chhetri told The Daily Star.

Chhetri said 90 percent of the planes land from the south-side at the Tribhuvan International Airport (TIA).

That day as well the ATC asked the plane to land from the south-side, which is safer compared to the north-side, he said.

At least 51 people were killed as the US-Bangla Airlines aircraft crashed and burst into flames while landing at the Kathmandu airport in Nepal on March 12.

Twenty-eight Bangladeshis, 22 Nepalis, and one Chinese citizen were killed in the deadly crash.

Soon after the crash, a YouTube audio clip of a reported conversation between US-Bangla flight BS211 and the air traffic control (ATC) of Tribhuvan International Airport prior to the crash reveals startling confusion over what was going on.

There appeared to be confusion over which end the plane was supposed to land, whether it had permission to land, and traffic on runway.

The Daily Star could not verify the authenticity of the audio tape that had apparently been trimmed to shorten the pauses between the ATC transmitting messages.

At the beginning of the tape, the ATC is heard repeatedly asking BS211 not to approach runway 20 and asks it to go on holding position, which is usually a circular in the air.

Pilot Abid Sultan informs ATC that he is taking a right turn for the holding position for runway 02, which is the same runway but approached from the other end.