(Trinidad Guardian) Fly Montserrat has confirmed that one of its aircraft rolled onto the grass on landing at John Osborne Airport in Montserrat this morning. Investigators from UK air accident investigation branch are now on the island to look into the accident.
In a statement issued yesterday, Fly Montserrat stated, “The flight, 5M 2109, from Antigua with seven passengers, landed normally and decelerated along the runway. The pilot thought that he felt a minor vibration and as a precaution, he let the aircraft roll gently onto the grass, where the passengers disembarked. There were no injuries and no damage to the aircraft.”
In a brief statement, the Montserrat government has confirmed no injuries were reported.
The incident follows a deadly plane crash at the VC Bird International Airport last Sunday.
British citizen Michael Hudson, who miraculously survived Sunday’s crash, was up to Friday recovering and in “relatively good spirits” following surgery at Antigua’s Mount St John’s Medical Centre.
The 23-year-old English-man was the sole survivor of the tragedy which killed three Caribbean nationals when the nine-seater Fly Montserrat Britten-Norman BN2 A Islander lost height immediately after becoming airborne and plunged back onto the runway.
The aircraft’s pilot, Jason Forbes of Antigua, and 29-year-old Jamaican teacher Annya Duncan were pronounced dead at the scene. The other passenger, Sandrama Poligadu, 57, of Guyana, was rushed to hospital but died shortly afterwards.
Meanwhile, the Eastern Caribbean Civil Aviation Authority (ECCAA) says “significant quantities of water” had been found in the engine of the Montserrat Airways Limited that crashed soon after taking off from the V.C Bird Inter-national airport on October 7, the Caribbean Media Corporation reported yesterday
CMC said that in a preliminary report, the ECCAA said that one of the two engines “was not producing power at the time of impact, and a probe of the fuel system feeding that engine found significant quantities of water.
