Plane that crashed in India, killing 55, was to be grounded

PATNA, India - A Boeing 737-200 jet that crashed and burst into flames Monday, killing 55 people on board and on the ground in this eastern Indian city, was scheduled to be taken out of service by the end of the year.

The plane smashed into two homes about a mile from its destination, leaving weeping relatives digging through flaming wreckage in search of more survivors and officials trying to determine what caused the crash. Seven of the 58 people on the plane survived.

''Miracles do take place in this world. I thank God for it,'' said Bharat Rungta, a passenger who told Press Trust of India he was jolted out of sleep when the Alliance Air plane went down. ''I managed to jump out of the plane,'' he said from his hospital bed.

Indian aviation guidelines call for aircraft to be grounded after 20 years - the exact age of the plane that crashed Monday, according to the domestic news agency United News of India. But a Boeing spokesman in Seattle, Russ Young, said the planes can fly ''virtually indefinitely,'' as long as they are properly maintained.

Indian Airlines, the government-owned parent of Alliance Air, wants to replace all its 737s and Airbus 300s in two years, UNI said. A panel studying ways to modernize the fleet is expected to report in August.

Of the eight crashes since 1973 involving Indian Airlines, six have been Boeing 737s.

But Indian Airlines maintained the aircraft's age was not a factor Monday. ''This aircraft was fully airworthy,'' Indian Airlines spokesman Robin Pathak said in New Delhi.

''It's not a question of whether an aircraft is old or new, what counts is whether it is maintained well enough,'' Pathak said. ''There are more than 1,000 planes flying elsewhere that are more than 25 years old.''

Thirty-nine bodies, most of them burned beyond recognition, were pulled from wreckage after the Boeing 737-200 crashed into two brick houses near the capital of Bihar.

S.P. Modi, director of the airport authority at Patna, said the crash killed 51 of the 58 people on board, and four people on the ground. The plane carried no foreigners, officials said.

Young said the company had sent an investigator to the crash site.

Another Boeing spokesman in Seattle, Gary Lesser, said the plane was delivered in June 1980 and had recorded 42,000 flight hours.

Civil Aviation Minister Sharad Yadav announced a judicial inquiry into the crash and said the plane's cockpit voice recorder had been recovered.

The jet crashed while making a second attempt to land at an airport in Patna. Several witnesses said the plane was on fire before it came down, though a national aviation official said it was not.

After the crash, relatives, police and airport workers rushed to the wreckage and searched for survivors. They used shovels, bare hands and homemade implements to dig through debris and pull people from the damaged houses.

Eleven survivors were taken to the hospital - seven of them from the plane and four from the housing complex, hospital officials said.

Civil Aviation Ministry secretary A.H. Jung told reporters that the pilot, Capt. Sohan Pal, had requested to circle for a second time before attempting a landing - something Jung said was not unusual.

But Pal, who had 4,300 flying hours, may have been flying too low as he made his second approach, Jung said.

''There was nothing wrong with the plane's systems. The pilot reported no problems during the flight,'' he said. He said the plane was in ''perfect condition.''

Witnesses on the ground and at least one survivor said the plane was smoking or in flames before it smashed into the Gardanibagh housing complex for government employees.

''I was sitting by the window in the front section of the aircraft, which started shaking dangerously when we were preparing to land after smoke was sighted,'' said Rohit Ranjan Sinha, a Calcutta businessman. He survived with burns.

The United News of India quoted witness Ullas Mandal as saying: ''I saw the aircraft wrapped in smoke, wobbling in the sky at a low altitude for a few seconds before its left wing was torn off after grazing a neem tree.''

Jung denied those reports.

The plane was en route to New Delhi, with scheduled stops at Patna and Lucknow. The majority on board had booked their flights to Patna, a city of 1.5 million and the capital of India's poorest state, Bihar, airline officials in Calcutta said.

India has a poor record of air safety because of outdated equipment at most of its airports.

The international airports at New Delhi, Bombay, Madras and Calcutta started using sophisticated air traffic control systems by U.S. manufacturer Raytheon in 1999. That was more than two years after a collision between a Saudi airliner and a Kazak cargo plane over New Delhi killed 349 people in India's worst air crash.