I wasn’t going to write anything on this, the third anniversary of the Gorkha Earthquake. Then Malindo Air Flight 181 skidded off the runway during take-off from Tribhuvan International Airport. Once again TIA was closed for many hours. If Nepal’s one and only international airport with its single runway is blocked or otherwise out of action, what happens in an emergency?
Within hours of the earthquake on April 25, 2015, other countries were flying in emergency relief workers and aid. Many tourists and residents left the country a few days later on these returning relief planes. I myself had the experience of flying in a Royal Australian Air Force cargo plane to Bangkok.
Everyone fully expected the runway to be damaged by a big earthquake, despite the fact it sits on land less susceptible to liquefaction than much of Kathmandu. We were extremely lucky in 2015. But what if Malindo or any other airliner was blocking the runway just prior to a major earthquake? As we saw when Turkish Airlines skidded on landing and blocked the runway for several days, Nepal does not have the equipment necessary to move a heavy plane.
Recently I did some research on the Thai Airlines and Pakistan Airlines air crashes that both happened in 1992 as the planes approached TIA. That did not make for good reading. Steps to improve air safety have been taken since. But despite these steps, including a brand new radar system installed as recently as December 2017, the US Bangla Airlines crash of last month has left many bereft and many more horrified and, yes, scared. Accidents do happen. That’s a fact. Whether human or equipment error or just sheer bad luck, we cannot escape that ‘shit happens’.
So we need to be prepared. Yet Nepal is often very unprepared. At the moment the runway is due to be lengthened by 300m so that a localizer antenna can be installed at the end of it. The reason for the lengthening is that planes should not come within 150m of the antenna and the current runway is not long enough to accommodate that.
Money has been allocated and the contractor has been selected. Yet several months on, the contractor has not started work. The completion deadline of early 2019 will definitely be missed. We can speculate why things like this happen, but we know that it is not just ‘bad luck’. Meantime, we wait for this additional safety feature to be installed—at some point—in the future.
Many lives have been lost through natural disasters, including the Gorkha Earthquake, and many others have been lost through plane crashes. I express my sympathy to everyone affected by these terrible events. This week I am leaving the rest of this column blank … because I am simply without words.
