Air India jet landed on closed Mumbai runway

NEW DELHI: This is as close a shave as can be. The Air India aircraft which landed in Mumbai on Friday morning without air traffic control (ATC) clearance had actually touched down when the runway was closed for inspection! Initial probe into the incident has revealed that there were jeeps and personnel on the runway to look for bird remains when the erstwhile Indian Airlines' Airbus A-320 kept coming in to land despite warnings from the ATC about the runway being shut and that it should go-around.
Highly placed ATC sources say that an aircraft reported bird hit after taking off from Mumbai on Friday morning. On getting this report, the ATC closed the runway for inspection to remove bird remains. This is done to prevent aircraft engines from sucking in bird remains from the runway and then getting damaged.
An IndiGo aircraft was sequenced to land after the aircraft — which reported the bird hit — had taken off. Since ATC had sent "follow me jeeps” for inspecting the length and breadth of the runway, the IndiGo aircraft was asked to go-around, technical term for an incoming aircraft not to touch down on the runway but to gain altitude and fly away to return later. It did that.
AI flight 944 from Abu Dhabi was right behind the IndiGo aircraft. ATC officials kept radioing the pilot to go-around just like they had told the IndiGo commander. "Despite repeated contacts from us, the pilot kept approaching to land and did not respond to our frantic radio messages. When we saw that the aircraft is continuing to descend and not going around, we asked the jeeps on the runway to immediately clear the airstrip. Luckily they managed to do that just in time when the plane landed and a major tragedy was averted,” said a senior ATC official.
Director general of civil aviation (DGCA) Arun Mishra is learnt to have taken a very serious view of the incident. On Saturday, DGCA officials in Mumbai got the ATC tapes and interrogated the pilots. "Ironically, what saved the day was that the runway was shut for operations. Otherwise it would have been a big disaster with a plane landing in just like that in a busy cross-runway airport like Mumbai,” said an official.
But the horror story on ground does not end here as what happened in the aircraft was even scarier. Sources close to the pilot who was in command of this aircraft say that the A-320's two-way communication system had a snag. "The pilot reportedly could not contact the ATC and was getting a highly garbled communication from the ground. When three miles from touchdown, the pilot had visual contact with the runway (could see it). A little later he saw jeeps going from the runway and presumed he had been cleared to land and did so,” said a colleague of the pilot.
Senior pilots, however, blame the new rules that allow airlines to utilize pilots for longer hours and say fatigue may have led to Friday's close shave. "The aircraft took off at five minutes past midnight on Friday from Mumbai. It reached Abu Dhabi and then had a quick turnaround to Mumbai. The crew operated the flight throughout the night (in the window of circadian low between 2 am and 5.59 am when the body rhythm's the lowest). Fatigue could have led to this mess. The Mangalore crash also happened due to fatigue with the cockpit crew operating a night flight from Mangalore to Dubai and then back the same night,” said a senior commander.
Both AI and DGCA are probing the incident and the pilot and co-pilot have been derostered. The commander of AI 944 had earlier had his check pilot status taken away from him following a hard landing in Rajkot.