Military plane crash in Binh Dinh: Pilot has no choice but to parachute

The information was given to the press by Lieutenant General Pham Truong Son, Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Vietnam People's Army, late on November 6, when authorities completed the rescue of two pilots from the Ham Ho forest area, Tay Phu commune, Tay Son district, more than 10 hours after the Yak-130 crashed during a training flight at noon the same day.

Having flown fighter jets and fighter jets, and then Deputy Commander of the Air Defense - Air Force, Lieutenant General Pham Truong Son said that the accident that the two pilots of the 940th Air Force Regiment encountered was an "extremely complicated" incident. Because when preparing to return to the airport, they discovered that the right rear landing gear was not deployed, while the two front and left rear landing gears were ready to land. In the proposed solutions, the pilots even created a large overload "folding and almost destroying the plane" and the landing gear could not be lowered.

"If all the landing gears are not deployed, the pilot can still land on the belly of the plane. However, if one landing gear does not come out and the other landing gears cannot be folded, then in this situation, a parachute is definitely required," said Lieutenant General Pham Truong Son, adding that after receiving orders from the flight commander, the two pilots flew the Yak-130 and then jumped into a mountainous area about 30 km from Phu Cat airport.

According to the Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Vietnam People's Army, the Yak-130 aircraft is designed for two pilots to sit in the front and back cabins. When the parachute opens in an emergency situation, the person sitting in the back will fly out first. The projectile pushes the gravity of the ejection seat up to 20 times the normal, affecting the pilot's health. After being brought out of the forest, the two victims were transferred to Military Hospital 17 of Military Region 5 in Da Nang.

"After completing the rescue, we will draw preliminary lessons, then organize a search for the crashed plane's location, decode the black box to find the cause of the rear right landing gear not deploying," said Lieutenant General Pham Truong Son.

Yesterday morning, November 6, Colonel Nguyen Van Son, Regiment Commander, and Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Hong Quan, Regiment Flight Director, piloted a Yak-130 (regiment number 210D) for a long-distance flight practice in complex meteorological conditions. When the exercise ended at nearly 11:00 a.m. and they were preparing to land, they discovered that the plane could not release its landing gear, so they requested permission to parachute. The two pilots crashed about 1 km apart and called the unit after several hours of being missing.

The Ministry of National Defense mobilized many units of Military Region 5 to coordinate with local authorities to use a series of measures such as dispatching helicopters, searching for phone signals, and using radar to locate vehicles to find the location of the plane and pilot. Lieutenant General Pham Truong Son said that the units had to calculate on the navigation map to give every minute information about the speed, altitude of the plane, parachute design, wind direction... to grasp the direction the pilot fell in order to effectively deploy rescue forces.

"The search took place in complex weather conditions, heavy rain, strong winds, and an area with many mountains 550-900 m high, but the forces did not mind the hardships and coordinated and collaborated precisely to find the two pilots," said Mr. Son.