Before Mumbai crash, engineer told father about 'sick aircraft'

Just hours before she took off on the plane which crashed in Mumbai's Ghatkopar suburb, the flight engineer of the aircraft had told her Haryana-based father that she was going on a test flight of a "sick aircraft".

Aircraft Maintenance Engineer Surabhi Gupta, who perished in the air crash on Thursday along with three other crew members, had told her father S.P. Gupta in Sonipat town over phone that she was going to fly in the old and sick aircraft.

She spoke to her father on phone on Thursday morning. She died in the crash hours later.

"It was a routine call. But she told me that she was going to fly in a sick aircraft which was earlier owned by the Uttar Pradesh government and was quite old," Gupta told media in Sonipat, around 50 km from Delhi, on Friday.

He emanded a thorough probe into how the sick aircraft, now owned by a private company, was given permission to fly.

He said that Surabhi loved to fly and was awarded by the Maharashtra government recently.

Surabhi had got married last year only. Her husband is a pilot.

The 12-seater aircraft, which had taken off from the Juhu airport less than an hour before the incident, crashed into an under construction building in Ghatkopar in Mumbai, killing both pilots and two aircraft engineers on board, along with a pedestrian on the ground.

--IANS

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