Trinidad’s Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar says she was told that the cockpit door had to be cut away to free Fareed Dean, the pilot of the plane which crash-landed here on Saturday morning, the Trinidad Guardian reported in today’s edition.
Persad-Bissessar said she was told that the cockpit door had to be cut away with an axe to free Dean. She told the Guardian that Dean was then taken out of the wreckage. But she said Dean was now walking, though with some pain. “The cockpit was so totally squashed, it’s a miracle they’re alive,” she told the Guardian. After meeting Dean and his crew yesterday, she said: “They are traumatised, but given what we saw, I think they would have made their best efforts regardless of what happened and attempted to have that aircraft be as safe as they could. “When I saw them, they wanted to come home, but they can’t right away as they have to be interviewed by the investigators,” she said. “I saw a bit of a lift in their spirits when we walked in to see them. We prayed with them and they were a bit more comforted when we left.” The Prime Minister told the Guardian that she had suggested that CAL fly a relative of each flight crew member to Guyana to give them support.
The Guardian also reported that the ministerial team, which travelled home on CAL yesterday, arrived at Piarco in a solemn mood. Minister Suruj Rambachan said that seeing the broken CAL aircraft lying on the Guyana ground had been “an emotional and deep experience for us.” He told the Guardian: “Seeing it on paper is one thing, but seeing one of T&T’s own aircraft on the ground in real life was another.” Persad-Bissessar told the Guardian: “When we got into Guyana on Saturday, we visited the site where the aircraft was and it was a…stunning sight. “It was really a heart-rending sight to see this aircraft, you know, nose-dived into the sand—and broken along the spin—I thought that was bad enough, but when we visited in the light today (Sunday), it was much more fearsome to look at,” she added. “So it is indeed miraculous what has happened because not a life was lost…Not a fatality.”
Admitting the incident was the worst so far for CAL, Persad-Bissessar, however, told the Guardian it served to remind of CAL’s safety record. “Not a life was lost, other airlines cannot say that,” she added. “The aircraft remains virtually intact in the conditions at the scene as when it landed there.” She said the plane would be dismantled only after they were advised by investigators.
The return of the crew and aircraft to T&T would depend on the length of the probe. The aircraft, which was leased in 2007, was insured, she added. Persad-Bissessar told the Guardian: “We don’t know what happened and we have no intention of speculating. This is a very serious business…I cannot say it was pilot error, runway error, aircraft malfunction—those are matters better handled by the experts.” She said she hoped the probe would be concluded in the fastest possible time as it would be in T&T’s interest to know the cause to take steps to prevent a similar incident. Confirming that there would be some impact on CAL, she said CAL’s board was dealing with the situation to contain this. Persad-Bissessar said there was a lot of misinformation yesterday on the Internet and blogs regarding a St Maarten crash and another in the region which did not involve CAL.
