Plane flips over while landing at Sossusvlei

A LIGHT aircraft with five people on board ended up on its roof after landing at an airstrip in the Sossusvlei area on Saturday.

The Cessna 210, registration number V5-RAS and operated by air charter company Scenic Air – flipped tail over nose after apparently making a hard landing at an airstrip at Sossusvlei Mountain Lodge at the end of a flight from Eros Airport in Windhoek.
It took off from Eros Airport shortly after 10h00 on Saturday, Titus Shuungula, an investigator with the Directorate of Aircraft Accident Investigations in the Ministry of Works and Transport, told The Namibian yesterday.
Shuungula said the aircraft, with a 22-year-old pilot at the controls, appeared to have had a hard landing, resulting in it flipping over onto its roof.
One passenger suffered a broken arm, while the others sustained less serious injuries, Shuungula and Owen Sivertsen, co-owner of Scenic Air, told The Namibian.
Sivertsen also said that the plane had apparently made a hard landing. In the process, its nose wheel broke off and the plane ended up on its roof, he said.
Shuungula said the aircraft was badly damaged.
The incident on Saturday was the second serious mishap to befall a Scenic Air plane this year.
On May 9, a Cessna 210 operated by the company made an emergency landing on the grounds of TransNamib’s Gammams Training Centre, having experienced an engine problem shortly after take-off from Eros Airport.
Two French nationals, two American visitors to Namibia, and a South African pilot were injured in that incident.
In the months after May, incidents in which aircraft flipped over onto their roofs after landing also took place in the Erongo and Kunene regions.
In the first of those incidents, a Cessna 210 carrying a pilot and a party of five tourists was badly damaged after it carried out a forced landing in the desert close to the Swakopmund Airport at the end of a sightseeing flight to Sossusvlei. That aircraft too ended up on its roof following the landing.
A smaller Cessna 206 aircraft suffered a similar fate after landing at a remote landing strip at Khumib River in the Skeleton Coast area on July 26. Two German tourists and the pilot emerged unscathed.

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