By IANS,
Faridabad: Staring at the mangled remains of the aircraft and the pile of bricks that once was a house, the nightmare seemed far from over for shocked residents of Parvatiya colony here Thursday. A flash of light in the sky, a thunderous sound, erupting flames… it was a night they will remember forever.
A nine-seater chartered aircraft crashed into a house in the residential neighbourhood around 10.40 Wednesday night, killing 10 people, including seven on board.
“It was really scary. We woke up to a thunderous sound and saw flames erupting outside our house. The crashed aircraft had also damaged the grills of the boundary wall of our house,” said a resident of Parvatiya colony here.
“Fire brigade vans reached the spot late as they faced difficulty coming through the narrow streets of our colony.”
The plane was hired from Delhi-based Air Chartered Services India Pvt Ltd by Delhi’s Apollo Hospital as an air ambulance. It was carrying a 20-year-old student, Rahul Raj, who was critically ill and was being shifted from Patna to Apollo Hospital.
The aircraft fell on a two-storey residential building in Parvatia Colony, Sector 22, killing 10 people.
Three of those killed were residents of the house. The owner of the house is Shobha Ram. He and his son are said to be safe but his wife, daughter and daughter-in-law who were sleeping in the verandah perished.
The wall of another house collapsed after it caught fire, while the fuel from the broken aircraft fell inside yet another damaged house.
“As there were no power in the area, we were sitting outside. At around 10.30 p.m. I saw a flash of light that was fast approaching. As I was about to call others I saw a plane coming down – it had already caught fire. It was like watching an action Hollywood movie,” recalled another witness.
All 10 bodies have been found – the seven on board the plane and three on the ground.
Arjun Singh, another resident, said: “I saw a plane hovering in the sky and then it suddenly crashed. The petrol tank burst and there was fire all around. We tried to douse the fire in which one of our friends got injured.
“We called the fire brigade which reached only after an hour. In the meantime people started throwing buckets of water to control the fire,” he said.
A.K. Yadav, a doctor, said the bodies were badly burnt.
“Three people — Harvinder, Omkar, Satish — who sustained injuries while rescuing people (on the ground) are in hospital,” he said. “They are under observation.”