'WE WERE LOOKING AT IT... THEN IT WAS HURTLING DOWN AT US' By Frederick Noronha, Indo-Asian News Service
VASCO DA GAMA (Goa), Oct 1: At least 15 persons, including 12 naval personnel and officers, were killed in an aircrash here, after two Ilyushin planes accidentally collided into each other just outside Goa's naval air station Tuesday morning. Both the Ilyushin Soviet-build crafts crashed just close to Goa's lone Dabolim airport, and on a hillock on the outskirts of this coastal state's port town which is home to the sprawling naval station. One craft ploughed into a half-finished bungalow. Some of the workers inside -- migrant labour from Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh -- had a miraculous escape. It narrowly missed a college, located barely 400 metres away, where classes were underway. Crowds were seen thronging to the venue to the mishap, to see the hard-to-believe site, atop a hillock overlooking the azure ARabian Sea. Fortunately this area is still half empty, with homes still coming up on a once-barren hillock, in a town which otherwise houses the most densely-packed localities of Goa. "There were a total of around 20 people (in the bungalow that the plane crashed into). There are three bodies. Five of us have been saved and three are still missing," carpenter Prabhakar Acharya (44) told this correspondent at the nearby Chicalim cottage hospital. "We were looking at it (the crafts in the sky) and within two minutes we realised that one of the planes was hurtling down at us," Acharya, from the village of Hangargatti in nearby South Karnataka's Udipi taluk told IANS, speaking in Hindi. On the site, Navymen were quick to cordon off the area. Vasco-da-Gama, a crowded port town of nearly 100,000 named after a sixteenth century Portuguese explorer and today a navy base, was largely plunged into a power-failure, as one of the crashing aircrafts ploughed also into a 33KV hightension line supplying power to the area, before grinding to a halt largely wrecked. "First I thought it was just a powerline crashing down. Then I realised what was happening, and was totally shocked," said 16-year-old student Srinivas Deshpande. One of the aircraft debris was scattered around his family bungalow's compound. Deshpande said he rushed to take his paralysed grand-mother to a neighbour's home, before fully realising what was happening. "The gate and garden was on fire," he told IANS. Outside his bungalow, mangled parts of the aorcraft were strewn. Navymen were seen requesting journalists to avoid inadvertnling trampling on the body parts strewn across the area. Goa is home to INS Hansa, India's premier naval air base. Currently this small state is considered to have the country's largest naval air station. In recent years, it has however been facing repeated air crashes of its vertical-takeoff Sea Harrier aircrafts, for unexplained reasons. But Tuesday's mishap could have been possibly caused due to human error. Besides being home to the IL 38, the maritime anti-submarine aircraft built by the former USSR and part of Squadron 315, Goa has also been home to the French-built turbo-prop Alize aircrafts, the Sea Harriers, the Soviet TU142Ms, Kamov 25 anti-submarine helicopters, and Chetak helicopters, among others. Vasco, till the early sixties a sleepy town of around six thousand, is today Goa's most-populous urban area. In past centuries, it was considered for becoming Goa's capital, after the old Portuguese colonial capital of Old Goa fell to disease and decay. In recent months, this town has been hit by a series of misfortune -- including a fire and explosion caused during the undetected thefts of petroleum products, and a leak from a naptha pipeline going to a fertilizer plant in the area. (ENDS) ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ To unsubscribe from Goanews Send a mail message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: 'unsubscribe goanews'
