Soon after takeoff, the pilot of QR-601, which departed for Doha at 10 am contacted the control tower and made a mayday call seeking a clear runway for emergency landing, complaining that smoke had filled the cabin.
The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA’s) fire and medical departments and others dealing with emergency situations had soon converged at the spot.
All the passengers on board were safely evacuated after the safe landing, and no injuries were reported.
According to CAA, the plane was filled with smoke, probably from the engines.
CAA staff and engineers immediately checked the plane for technical issues and will take off for the nearest possible facility, Muscat International Airport, for further maintenance.
The BKIA has been accommodating passengers from across the province as this is the only international facility in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
hile any plane crash in the modern age may feel like a freak occurrence, there’s no escaping the fact that some airlines are safer than others.
That much is made by clear by the existence of an EU “blacklist” of carriers banned from flying above European airspace (don’t worry, none you know), but a more thorough look at the incident logs of some of the world’s oldest airlines reveals that some are so safe they’ve never - or almost never - had a fatal crash.
Considering the jet era, beginning around the Fifties and Sixties, discounting the days when commercial air travel was a dangerous novelty in light aircraft, there is more than a handful of carriers to have never lost a life on one of their planes.
This week's incident on a Southwest aircraft - in which a woman died after being half sucked out of a window that had been smashed by part of one of the plane's engines - has provided a rare blot on the airline's otherwise clean safety record.
Though not a crash, it is the American carrier's first in-flight fatality. Flying since 1971, the airline's only other fatal incident is when in 2005, a 737 overran the runway upon landing at Chicago Midway International in heavy snow conditions and slid into the street, striking a car and killing a six-year-old boy.
