An Air Asia plane carrying 130 passengers and crew skidded off the runway as it landed at Kuching Airport in heavy rain last night.
Four passengers were believed to be unwell or suffered minor injuries.
The accident happened when Flight AK5218 from KL landed on runway 25 at 10.02pm. A passenger said the plane veered sharply to the left and right after it touched down and then skidded off the runway onto soft ground.
The question is, is drainage at the airport a problem – or was it something else?
The runway has been closed for now, and Kuching flights have been cancelled, Air Asia said on its website.
“So now, everyone can’t fly?” asked one tweet.
Services, however, are expected to be resumed later today.
Some users have suggested that drainage or some other factor at the airport runway could be a problem as several cases of skidding have been reported over the last decade (see below). The Kuching Airport runway length was “extended from 2454m to 3780m and shoulders from 46m to 60m, extension of existing parallel taxiway to a full parallel taxiway with interconnection/rapid exit taxiways including widening of taxiway fillets and shoulders to 30m”, according to Wikipedia. The work, under a RM620 million contract (another report mentions a figure of RM850 million) undertaken by Global Upline Sdn Bhd, was completed in 2008. Global Upline adviser Ting Pek King had been reported as saying that the four-year-long construction work was complicated as the area was swampy.
