MUMBAI: Sixty-nine years ago, on July 12, 1949, another aircraft had crashed between Ghatkopar and Powai, killing 45 people, including 14 American journalists and citizens of the
Netherlands, the UK, Canada and China. The fuselage of the ill-fated Franeker, a KLM Constellation, littered the verdant 800-foot
Powai Range, three miles north-east of Santa Cruz airport.
A day after the crash, TOIreported that bodies with severed limbs had been scattered across a half-mile radius and the pilot had burnt to death in the cockpit. “His left hand severed from his body, grasping a portion of the joystick, was found on a peak half a mile from where he perished,” stated the report. At the time, it was regarded as the worst air tragedy in India — a dubious title which now belongs to the 1996 Charkhi Dadri mid-air collision that left 349 dead — and a news reel about the KLM disaster was created by the Films Division.
The flight was bound for Amsterdam from Batavia, the capital of the Dutch East Indes (now
Indonesia). As permission to proceed to Karachi from Delhi was denied, it was diverted to Bombay’s Santacruz airport where it planned to refuel before continuing to
Cairo.
According to a report published by a committee set up to probe the crash, the pilot “made an error of judgment” and “the accident was the result of the aircraft striking trees on a cloud-obscured hill, in ... poor visibility”. Franeker was the first plane — flying the Dutch flag — allowed to land on Indian soil in seven months as the Indian government had imposed a ban to protest Dutch efforts to re-establish their colony in Indonesia.
Before the crash, the pilot was told to avoid the Powai range. Around 9.25am, they lost radio contact. The first responders to the crash were local villagers, the manager of a Powai estate and a head constable. By 2pm, the police had arrived and after nine hours of back-breaking labour, four hundred policemen were able to trace 36 bodies.