Questions raised over bin Laden plane crash

The Saudi-registered Phenom 300 jet crashed on several cars at a car auction lot near the runway at Blackbushe Airport, a small airfield in Hampshire, southern England, on Friday while attempting to land at the end of a flight from the Italian city of Milan.
 
Media reports said three relatives of bin Laden, the former al-Qaeda chief, were on board the £7-miilion plane. The three were identified as Rajaa Hashim, Osama’s stepmother; Sana bin Laden, his half-sister; and Sana’s husband Zuhair Hashim.
 
The British Guardian newspaper, meanwhile, said in a Sunday report that the crash appears to be a suspicious incident given the fact that the plane had used the runway, fitted with hi-tech safety features, regularly over the past several months.
 
‘Not making sense’
 
The plane was equipped with the fly-by-wire electronic system devised to facilitate its controlling, the report said, adding, “It was attempting a landing in near perfect conditions on a runway that was fitted with precision approach pathway indicators (Papis).”
 
The indicators are reportedly easy to be seen and flash white if the aircraft is flying too high while they become red if too low.
 
    “It doesn’t make sense to me as an ordinary pilot why something that advanced and easy to fly would bury itself in the auction ground at the end of such a long runway,” Simon Moores, a flight instructor and pilot, said.
 
The police, alongside the Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB), have launched a probe into the cause of the crash.
 
Bin Laden was the leader of al-Qaeda until his death in May 2011, when the US announced that he had been killed by US forces in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
 
Osama’s father Mohammed also died in a plane crash in Saudi Arabia in 1967. He was a construction mogul that fathered 54 children. Salem bin Laden, Osama’s half-brother, also lost his life in a plane accident on 1988.