Trainee pilot feared dead in Cessna crash

Mumbai/Jabalpur: A 22-year old trainee pilot was feared dead when a Cessna 172 crashed in the deep waters of Bargi dam in Madhya Pradesh on Monday evening.
This is the sixth crash involving a trainee pilot in one year in the country.
Y N Sharma, chief operating officer of Chimes Aviation Academy, identified the trainee pilot as Ritu Raj. “He had completed 100 hours of flying and was on a cross-country flight. He was in touch with our air traffic control. We got the last call from him at 4.10 pm. Right now, we don’t know what happened,” said Sharma. Sources said Raj was the only son of a Bokaro resident.
According to eye-witnesses, the single-engine, fixed-wing aircraft plunged into the dam at Gadaghat, 45 km from Jabalpur in Seoni district of Madhya Pradesh, around 4 pm only to bob around for a few minutes before sinking into its watery depths.
“Some local fishermen spotted the aircraft falling like a stone and hitting the water. They swam towards it only to see they could not approach the aircraft door as the propellor was still rotating,” said Suraj Jaiswal, former deputy mayor of Jabalpur.
“Fearing a blast they swam back towards the shore. By the time the aircraft had sunk. The Bargi dam is about 150 feet deep and it not possible to carry out any rescue operations after dusk,” he added.
Chimes Aviation Academy is one of the 10 new acadamies that have came up in the last one year following the aviation boom in India. It is the responsibility of the chief flying instructor to properly educate a student about emergencies and the dangers of crossing all manner of limitations in a solo cross-country flight.
07/04/09 Manju V & Chinmayi Shalya/Times of India