PARIS/KARACHI: Air crash investigators were en route from Pakistan to France on Monday with two ‘black box’ flight recorders of a Pakistani airliner that crashed in a residential area while trying to land in the port city of Karachi last month, airport officials said.
An Airbus test plane, unusually commissioned to transport the boxes because of disruption from the coronavirus crisis, was due to arrive on Monday afternoon at Le Bourget near Paris where France’s BEA air accident agency was standing by to open them.
The French agency is involved in the Pakistan-led probe because the crashed A320 was designed by France-based Airbus, and is additionally carrying out the crucial task of decoding the recorders because it has state-of-the-art equipment.
The A320 operated by Pakistan International Airlines crashed short of the runway on May 22, killing 97 people on board after the pilots reported the loss of both engines.
Two passengers survived and there were no reports of casualties on the ground. The crash site remained sealed off on Monday.
BEA experts are expected to open and download information from the boxes — one containing cockpit voice recordings and the other aircraft data — on Tuesday, subject to the recording chips being intact inside their crash-resistant shells.
Initial reports suggested the jetliner scraped its engines along the runway on a first attempt to land following what appeared to be an unstable approach, arriving steep and fast.
Investigators will analyze the cockpit data to try to understand whether damage to the engines from the first landing attempt caused them to cut out before the second attempt, leaving the airplane unable to make it to the airport perimeter.
Experts warn it is too early to say what caused the crash.
In Karachi, as officials continued to try to identify victims’ bodies using DNA samples, families took to social media to voice their grief at not being able to perform the last rites of their loved ones.
The airline said on Sunday problems in identifying victims were caused by delays in DNA identification outside its control.
Black boxes from crashed Pakistan jet head to France for analysis
https://arab.news/2s96j
Black boxes from crashed Pakistan jet head to France for analysis
- French agency is involved in the Pakistan-led probe because the crashed A320 was designed by France-based Airbus
- A320 operated by PIA crashed short of the runway on May 22, killing 97 people on board
Pakistan launches final polio drive of 2025 as official calls disease persistence an embarrassment
- Sindh chief minister says Muslim-majority countries have eliminated polio by ensuring universal vaccination
- Sindh chief minister says Muslim-majority countries have eliminated polio by ensuring universal vaccination
ISLAMABAD: Pakistan launched its final nationwide polio vaccination campaign of 2025 on Monday as a senior government official described the continued presence of the disease in the country as an embarrassment and said the only way to eradicate it was to vaccinate every child under the age of five.
The campaign, which will run from Dec. 15 to Dec. 21, aims to administer oral polio drops to more than 45 million children across the country, according to the National Emergency Operations Center (NEOC).
Pakistan is one of only two countries in the world, along with Afghanistan, where polio has not yet been eradicated.
“There is only one way to eliminate this disease, and the entire world has adopted it: every child under the age of five must be given two drops of the polio vaccine,” Sindh Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah said while inaugurating the campaign in Karachi.
“There is no other way.”
Shah said it was “quite embarrassing” that polio continued to persist in Pakistan, noting that around 30 children had been infected so far this year, including nine cases in Sindh province.
He added that many Muslim-majority countries had successfully eliminated polio by ensuring universal vaccination of children.
To ensure the safety of vaccination teams, authorities have deployed around 21,000 security personnel nationwide, including about 1,000 women, to accompany frontline polio workers during the campaign, Shah said.
According to the NEOC, more than 23 million children will be vaccinated in Punjab, over 10.6 million in Sindh, about 7.2 million in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and more than 2.6 million in Balochistan.
The campaign also targets around 460,000 children in Islamabad, 228,000 in Gilgit-Baltistan and more than 760,000 in Azad Jammu and Kashmir.
Health authorities have urged parents to cooperate with vaccination teams, open their doors to polio workers and ensure that all children under five receive two drops of the vaccine, while also completing routine immunization schedules for infants up to 15 months old.
Pakistan has struggled for decades to eradicate polio due to misinformation, vaccine hesitancy and security challenges, despite repeated nationwide immunization drives.
