Plane Missing in Afghanistan, 104 Onboard

An official from private Afghan company Kam Air said there had been no contact with the jet traveling from the western city of Herat to Kabul since Thursday afternoon, February 3, when it had requested to land in Pakistan.

“Yes the plane went missing. There were 96 passengers on board. The plane was going from Herat to Kabul,” Attila Kamgar, Kam Air’s financial controller, was quoted by Agence France-Presse (AFP) as saying.

“… the plane requested to talk with the (Kabul control) tower. Then there was no more information. After one hour the plane requested to land in Peshawar (in Pakistan) and Peshawar said it did not land,” Kamgar added.

Shah Mohammad, a Kam Air representative, said besides 96 passengers, eight crew members were also on board.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai said he was “deeply concerned” over the fate of the missing jetliner.

He ordered the interior, defense, transport and intelligence ministries to “use all possibilities” to find the plane and support international peacekeepers and US-led coalition forces in the hunt.

“Bad Weather”

Afghan transport minister Enayatullah Qasimi said the plane disappeared from radar screens when it was just miles from Kabul.

“The last contact they made was to Kabul airport asking for the weather information,” he told a press conference in Kabul Friday, February 4.

For the last month and a half Kabul airport had been equipped with a system allowing aircraft to land in low visibility, the minister added.

“As far as I know the landing was possible — whether to land or not land is decided by the pilots.”

Kam Air operations deputy manager Feda Mohammad Fedawi told AFP the plane last made contact with air traffic controllers in Kabul at 3:15pm (1045 GMT).

“We have checked with close airports in the region. Most of them have replied that no such plane has landed,” he said.

“Due to the bad weather, the plane could not land in Kabul. It made contact with the tower at 3:15pm and then the contact was broken.”

Kamgar said Peshawar airport officials had told them they had no knowledge of the plane when contacted by Kam Air later Thursday at 7.00 pm.

The Pakistan Civil Aviation Authority said they had no record of a Kam Air flight landing in any Pakistani city last night.

The Afghan Civil Aviation Information Service said: “We cannot confirm or deny that the Kam Air flight has gone missing.”

The company had contacted the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the NATO-led peacekeeping force, for help. An ISAF spokesman said the body was still trying to locate the plane at 7:00am local time.

Elsewhere

Another Kam Air official, Aziz Ahmad, refused to speculate on the fate of the plane, saying it could have landed elsewhere.

“We can’t confirm whether it has crashed. We don’t know where it has landed,” he told AFP.

Planes bound for Kabul are regularly diverted to Peshawar during the winter months, where blizzards reduce visibility and make landing hazardous in the mountainous region.

Kabul airport is also closed to civilian aircraft at night.

Communications are often extremely poor in Afghanistan, where 40 percent of the country is 1,800m above sea level and much of the landscape is rugged mountain terrain.

Kam Air is the first privately-run Afghan airline and was launched in November 2003 with a fleet comprising a Boeing 767, a Boeing 727, an Antonov 23 and the Boeing 737 missing since Thursday, Kamgar said.

The airline connects several towns in Afghanistan and also has international flights to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.