Kam Air Flight 904
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The Kam Air Flight 904 disaster was an aviation disaster in February 2005. The incident took place shortly after 4:00 p.m. on February 3 (local time), when a private Kam Air Boeing 737-200 jet aircraft in Afghanistan went missing during a domestic flight from the western city of Herat to Kabul International Airport in the capital of Kabul to the east. The crash is the deadliest air disaster in Afghan history.
The aircraft lost communication during a snowstorm. The cause of the loss of communication, and the subsequent crash, is presently unknown. Taliban leader Mullah Dadullah said his guerrilla fighters had not shot down the plane and expressed sadness at the crash. Air traffic control for Afghanistan is provided by the US occupation force operating out of the Bagram airport. Bagram has become a US airbase and is the closest airport to Kabul where 904 could divert to land safely.
Conspiracy theories accusing the US of playing a role in the crash have sprouted on the internet. One such theory is that the plane ran out of fuel after being turned away by US troops occupying the Bagram Airbase. Flight 904 could not land at Kabul due to bad weather and diverted to Bagram as a final choice. Bagram air traffic control refused permission to land even after being informed that Flight 904 had only 15 minutes of fuel remaining. This claim of landing clearance being denied by US air traffic control at Bagram was first published in the Pakistani print and Internet news and in an international shortwave broadcast interview on Radio Tehran.
A NATO search-and-rescue operation was launched, and the tail of the plane was sighted from two Dutch Apache helicopters at around 9:30 a.m. UTC. The plane was at about 20 km (12.5 miles) east of Kabul, in remote mountainous terrain on the side of Chaperi Mountain at an altitude of 3,300 metres (11,000 feet). All 104 people on board are most likely dead, and the plane was completely destroyed.
The flight data recorder had been found and turned over to US National Transportation Safety Board analysis. The cockpit voice recorder which would confirm or deny the alleged request and denial to land at Bagram has not been located.
Of the 104 people on board, 96 were passengers and eight were crew. At least 24 were foreign nationals: nine Turks, six Americans, four Russians, three Italians and one Iranian, as well as the first officer, who held dual citizenship in Canada and Russia. According to reports, the Russians were crew members, the Turks were civilians working for Turkey-based firms, and the Italians included an architect working for the United Nations Andrea Pollastri, as well as another Italian civilian and a navy captain. Three of the six Americans on board were women working for the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Management Science for Health company.
Kam Air is a private airline established in 2003 operating a fleet of leased Boeing and Antonov aircraft on both domestic and international routes. Flight 904 was a Boeing 737-200 registered EX-037, which was originally delivered to Nordair as C-GNDR in 1980. It had been leased by Kam Air from Phoenix Aviation, a firm based at Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.
