Pakistan Airliner Landed Gear Up On First Try: Report

Pakistan media is reporting Pakistan International Airlines Flight PK8303 landed gear up and the crew muscled it back into the air before it crashed on a second landing attempt, killing 97 of 99 people aboard on Friday. According to reports gathered by the Aviation Herald, the A320 slid on its nacelles at the airport in Karachi for more than a thousand feet before it became airborne again. Sometime during the go-around the engines quit and the aircraft crashed just short of the airport in a residential area. Four people on the ground were taken to a hospital with burns but nobody was killed.

The media has shown videos and images of the aircraft and the scrape marks on the runway and local planespotters got still photos of the plane with apparent scrape marks on both nacelles and the ram air turbine deployed just before it went down. Security video shows the aircraft in an extreme nose-high attitude as the crew issues a Mayday and descends into the neighborhood. The crash damaged 25 houses but because they were all built of concrete none were destroyed. The aircraft was on a scheduled flight from Lahore.