Chief Operating Officer Air Blue, Shahid Khaqan Abbasi on Friday said registration was under way to give insurance money to the families of 152 air crash victims. Shahid Khaqan Abbasi who is also member of the National Assembly from PML-N said this while addressing a news conference at a local hotel here. He said the families of the victims could get themselves registered on the website or at the offices of Air Blue.
He said as many as 102 dead bodies have been identified which have been handed over to the victims' families. He said 62 samples of the victims' relatives have been taken for DNA tests. Answering a question, he said our first objective is to hand over the dead bodies to the relatives as soon as possible.
Khaqan said investigation into the incident is under way and media should avoid speculations. Our members are also part of the investigation, he added. "We want that the findings of the probe should be made public so that people could know the cause of the incident," he said. Answering another question, Khaqan said that black box of the plane has not yet been found; however, its search is going on.
However, he said the tail section was located on Thursday but it was buried under a lot of rubble. "We spent whole Friday cutting the shrubs and we are hopeful that we will be able to recover the black box by Saturday," he added. In reply to another query, he said all the systems of the plane were functioning normally and the plane had no technical fault.
The Chief Operating Officer said that the plane was flying only 1,000 feet above the ground and only the pilot could take the decision of landing. He said the insurance price of the plane was $35 million. He said the plane was latest and its age was 10 years. He said flying time of the plane was 34,000 hours and the pilot flew 25,000 hours.
Answering a question, he said age limit of a pilot is 65 years while the age of Captain Pervez Iqbal Chaudhry was 61 years. Later, talking to Business Recorder, Khaqan Abbasi said Air Blue has six planes and in next five years its figure would reach 14.
Air-Blue Deputy Director General Riaz-ul-Haq told BR that they are gathering all the details, wreckage samples, documented evidence and conversations. Besides, he said the representatives of Air-Blue are conducting a separate inquiry while two teams will collaborate whenever and wherever deemed necessary. Answering a question about the incident, he said we do not know what happened to the plane. We could find actual facts after the investigation.