Nagpur: A 24-year-old woman trainee pilot and her instructor were killed as a twin-engined plane belonging to Gondia's National Flying Training Institute (NFTI) crashed on Wednesday morning near Tiroda town, 120 kms from here.The deceased have been identified as Himani Kalyan, who is from Delhi, and 44-year-old Ranjan Gupta, who was residing in Gondia with his wife and 2 kids. The cause of accident is not known as yet. Himani's parents are working with Indigo airlines. Her parents are expected to reach Gondia directly in a chartered flight on Thursday.Accidents involving twin-engined training planes are extremely rare. Data from Directorate General of Civil Aviation reveal that most accidents have occurred in single-engine planes. Registered in 2010, the aircraft is relatively new.A majority of flying training is carried out on single-engine aircraft. But most flying training cadets do 15 hours of multi-engine flying, which is a mandatory requirement to apply for an airline job. The syllabus includes training to handle an engine failure (where one engine is shut down and the aircraft lands on a single-engine), forced landings (where the aircraft descends up to a certain height before it takes off) etc.The Diamond DA42 plane is reported to have taken off between 9 and 9.50am from Birsa airport in Gondia on a regular training sortie. It crashed into a reservoir within 20 minutes after travelling for about 50 kms. The site is close to Maharashtra's border with Madhya Pradesh. Police from both the states swung into action after the incident.The plane is likely to have hit a high tension wire which resulted in a wing getting damaged as a result of which the pilots lost control. It is not known why the plane was flying at such a low altitude — 80 metres as per police.The NFTI has given out no official communication about the incident but junior officers confirmed the mishap. This is the second time a plane that has taken from Gondia has crashed. On December 24, 2013, a single-engine Diamond 40 aircraft owned by the Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Udan Academy, Rae Bareili, had claimed one life.The plane fell into the reservoir in Mahalgaon-Deori village of Tiroda tehsil. The site is over 30 kms from the Adani Group's power plant at Tiroda town. Gondia SP Dilip Bhujbal said, "According to initial reports, the plane crashed following a collision with an electric wire."A TOI staffer was an eyewitness to the accident. He said the plane was seen flying at an abnormally low altitude at Mouda toll booth which is about 30 kms from Nagpur. The plane had just ducked a high tension wire connected to the National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) power plant. "The plane darted further ahead, turned left and vanished into the horizon," he said.A source, who has access to inside information, said that the plane took off after 9am. The last contact between the pilot and the Air Traffic Control at Birsi airport was at 9.29am. "This means that the flying was going on well, yet the plane soon crashed," said the source.Other sources said the engines of the twin-engined plane may have failed. "The plane was loosing altitude and the duo was trying to make an emergency landing by safely gliding down. However, the machine went out of control and got stuck in the high tension electric line leading to the crash," they said.Another source, who is also in the aviation training business, said that it was a session to learn instrument flying. This means that the flying is done solely relying on the instrument rather than visual judgement."In the normal course the instructor is supposed to keep an eye on the coordinates and the trainee manages the controls through instruments. During such flying, the plane has to be 2,000 feet above the highest structure in a vertical distance of 25 nautical miles. Coming too close to the high tension wire, which is barely 100 feet from the ground, raises several questions," said the training expert.

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