Passengers 45 Fatalities 49 (all) Date 5 August 1984 Injuries (nonfatal) 0 Location Dhaka | Crew 4 Survivors 0 Location Dhaka, Bangladesh Operator Biman Bangladesh Airlines | |
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Summary Controlled flight into terrain due to bad weather Site near Zia International Airport
Dhaka, Bangladesh Destination Shahjalal International Airport Similar 1984 TAM – Transport, Aeroservicios Ecuatorianos Flight 767, Vieques Air Link Flight 901A, 1984 Balkan Bulgarian, PBA Flight 1039 | ||
On 5 August 1984, a Biman Bangladesh Airlines Fokker F27-600 crashed into a marsh near Zia International Airport (now Shahjalal International Airport) in Dhaka, Bangladesh while landing in poor weather. The aircraft was performing a scheduled domestic passenger flight between Patenga Airport, Chittagong and Zia International Airport, Dhaka.
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With a total death toll of 49 people, it is the deadliest aviation disaster to occur on Bangladeshi soil and also the airlines' worst accident.
Aircraft
The aircraft, a Fokker F27-600 registered S2-ABJ, was manufactured in 1971. It first flew for Indian Airlines but it was given to Biman in 1972, as a part of all the support given to Bangladesh by the Government of India following Bangladesh's Independence. At the time of the accident, the aircraft had flown a total of 24,085 cycles and had accumulated a total of 15,595 airframe hours.
Passengers and crew
There were a total of 45 passengers and 4 crew members on board the flight, all of whom had died in the crash. There was one Briton and one Japanese among the passengers, all of the rest of the passengers (43) and all crew were Bangladeshi. 33 of the passengers were traveling to Dhaka to catch connecting flights to the Middle East.
The captain of the flight was Kaniz Fatema Roksana, well known as the first female commercial pilot of Bangladesh.
Accident
The weather conditions in Dhaka were poor on the day of the accident; there was turbulence and heavy rain made visibility very poor. Amid these conditions, the crew first attempted a VOR approach to Zia International Airport's runway 32. As the runway was not spotted by either crew member, a missed approach was executed. The crew then tried an ILS approach on runway 14 of the same airport, but a missed approach had to be executed again as both pilots had failed to spot the runway once again. On the crew's third approach (second on runway 14), the plane got too low while it was still several hundred meters from the runway but neither crew member realized this (due to the poor visibility) and the plane crashed into a swamp about 550 meters short of the runway.