THE Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines (Caap) on Monday grounded the entire fleet of the corporate charter service Lionair, as aircraft accident investigators recovered the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) of its jet that exploded on Sunday night, on a medical evacuation mission, killing eight people.
The Lionair twin-engine jet had erupted into a fireball at the end of runway 24 seconds after it appeared to have taken off from runway 06. Before the medical evacuation, Lionair had allowed its plane to be used to ferry badly needed medical supplies across the country in the fight against Covid-19, drawing praise from the Department of Health (DOH).
An eyewitness to Sunday night’s accident, Rene Salinas, saw the aircraft speeding along on runway 06. “I saw flames coming out of the engine,” Salinas, a janitor at the Manila International Airport Authority (Miaa), told the BusinessMirror. He said in Filipino that he was “transfixed by the sight” as he followed the plane from the glass window of the ramp control cab until darkness engulfed the corporate jet, with only the flames visible, “like a meteor.”
Salinas’s statement about the airplane having been airborne should be taken with a grain of salt since it was dark and only the sputtering engine is visible from his vantage point, said ramp controller Alger Ramo, a former pilot.
“The airline involved in the accident, RP-C5880, is Lionair Inc., a Charter airline registered in the Philippines and is not affiliated with Lion Air Indonesia, the low-cost airline based in Jakarta,” according to the Miaa.
The Caap closed the Naia to operations past 8 p.m. Sunday and allowed operations to resume at 5 a.m. Monday.
Captain Nick Castillo, a retired Philippine Airlines (PAL) pilot, said “there would be imbalance by the loss of power in one engine, and the airplane would ‘rotate’ [turn] towards the dead engine.”
He added: “A sudden rudder correction might result in a stall, meaning, the wings are no longer able to produce the required lift for normal flight and the plane falls to the ground.”
Retired air traffic officer Perry Casapao recalled an incident where a Fokker “F27” had one engine failure after takeoff on runway 13, then stalled and crashed on Moonwalk subdivision in Parañaque decades ago.
The Caap said the CVR “of the Agusta WW24 aircraft has been recovered from the scene and will further aid the investigation to answer why the crash occurred.”
The investigation for the crash and resulting fire will be conducted by the Aircraft Accident Investigation and Inquiry Board (AAIIB), while the Flight Safety Investigation Committee (FSIC) will see if aviation safety procedures were violated by the aircraft operator and/or the crew.
The Agusta WW24 aircraft carrying a patient caught fire Sunday shortly after leaving runway 06 at 7:56 p.m. and killed all the eight people on board. Filipino Doctor Nicko Bautista, an American national, a Canadian national and five other Filipinos perished in the flight. The Filipinos also included a flight medic, a nurse and three flight crew.
In September 2019, a Lionair twin-engine plane exploded mid-air and crashed into a resort village in Barangay Pansol in Calamba, Laguna. The crash killed nine passengers, including the pilot and copilot.
The Caap said that while investigation of RP-C5880 is ongoing, it had decided to ground Lionair’s entire fleet.