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Monday, July 09, 2007
2 small planes collide near Manila; 3 killed
MANILA -- Three persons, among them two Indian nationals, died when two small planes collided in mid-air in Malolos City, Bulacan shortly after noon Sunday.
Initial reports reaching national police headquarters Camp Crame in Quezon City said the Philippine-registered Cessna planes crashed in the middle of a rice field after the collision at 12:55 p.m. Sunday in the village of Ligas.
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Police identified those who died as Reena Salve, an Indian citizen, and Patrick Philip Ferwel, a Filipino. The two were piloting the planes. The third fatality was Ferwel's student Varsha Gopinanth, 25, also an Indian national.
Air Transport Office investigator Jose Saplan said the two planes flew too close to each other for still unexplained reasons as they were maneuvering to land at the airport in Plaridel town, near Malolos, causing them to collide and crash.
"We're still trying to investigate why they were so close to each other and then collided," Saplan said in a television interview.
A TV image showed villagers pulling a man, his face bloodied, out of the wreckage of one plane. In another, one of two female Indian nationals lay motionless on the ground, her pants ripped on the side apparently by the impact of the collision. A villager put his ear on her chest to check if she was still alive.
Police officer Gilberto Punzalan said initial investigation showed the two aircraft were being used for flight training when their wings grazed each other, causing the crash.
Rodrigo Grant, one of the Salve's flight instructors, said Salve had been practicing landings and takeoffs alone in her single-engine Cessna 152 plane and was on her way back to the Plaridel airport, about three kilometers from Malolos.
Salve, 25, had wanted to be a commercial pilot in her country and had logged enough hours in the air to be allowed to fly solo, Grant said.
A check of her plane showed it was airworthy before she flew it, Grant told The Associated Press.
He said he was grieving over the death of Salve, a cheerful student who always offered him coffee, and the two people aboard the other plane.
The accident could affect the flying school business, which has been recently boomed, he said.
"We're really very sad," Grant said. "We did not expect this because we were really very careful and concerned with safety." (AP/With VR/Sunnex)
For more Philippine news, visit Sun.Star Manila. (July 9, 2007 issue)
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