A nine-seater aircraft with seven persons on board — two doctors, a 19-year-old patient in critical condition, two relatives of the patient, and two pilots — crashed late on Wednesday night over Parvatiya Colony, a residential area in Faridabad, Haryana.
The plane went down at 10.45 pm about 16 nautical miles short of Delhi airport. Late-night television reports quoted the area SDM as saying 10 people had been killed and two injured. Haryana additional DGP B.S. Sandhu, however, put the confirmed deaths at nine.
It was not immediately clear how many persons on the aircraft were killed and how many on the ground. The reports also spoke of damage to some residences at the site and of a fire at the site.
The small aircraft was reportedly piloted by a Capt. Harpreet.
The plane, an air ambulance chartered from Air Services Charter Ltd, was flying from Patna to Delhi. The single-engine aircraft bearing the registration VT-ACS was carrying a critical patient, Rahul Raj, 19, who was suffering from acute jaundice and hepatitis, two of his family members, two doctors and two pilots. Raj, from Motihari in Bihar’s East Champaran district, was undergoing treatment at Patna’s Jagdish Memorial Hospital, a private clinic. “The patient was in a severely critical stage and had been on ventilator support. He was referred to Apollo Hospital in an emergency,” Dr Anjani Kumar, a doctor at Jagdish Memorial Hospital, told this newspaper.
Authorities were ascertaining if there was any collateral damage on the ground. The plane apparently got caught in bad weather — there had been a dust storm in the area at the time — and plummeted from 11,500 feet to 2,500 feet before crashing. Civil aviation ministry and Directorate-General of Civil Aviation officials have rushed to the spot. An inquiry has been ordered into the cause of the crash.