MANILA, 2 March 2008 — An Indian national and a Filipino died when their training plane crashed just outside Manila yesterday, the Air Transportation Office said.
The propeller-driven Cessna 150, operated by Flightline Aviation, a local flying school, went down in Plaridel town in Bulacan province, killing the Filipino flight instructor and his Indian student, an ATO official said. The cause of the crash was still under investigation, the office said. The names of the deceased were being withheld.
Yesterday’s accident was the third involving an Indian student pilot in the country in eight months. Officials noted that the three incidents all involved two-seater Cessna planes.
On July 8 last year, two Indian pilot-trainees were killed when two Cessna flight planes they were flying collided in the air during training flights over Bulacan province. A Filipino instructor was also killed and another was injured in that accident. ATO officials said the two planes from two different pilot schools based in Manila but training at the Plaridel airport in Bulacan.
Early last month, another two-seater Cessna 150 airplane flown by flight trainer Capt. Anselmo Pascual and student Vikas Poonia overturned as it was landing on an airstrip in Camotes Islands in the central province of Cebu. Both the instructor and trainee-pilot were slightly injured.
Investigators found that Poonia was making his fourth practice landing at the time of the accident. Local media quoted unnamed ATO investigators as saying the accident was caused by a combination of bad airport runway and pilot error. (Input from AFP & Inquirer News Service)
