Air India Express accident at Calicut was facilitated by the regulator, how?

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  Air India Airbus Landing at Port Blair (Source Dr Puneet) Blaming the pilots alone for an accident is like addressing the symptom rather than the root cause. The root cause of the Calicut accident of IX1344 on 7th Aug 2020 is the poor safety culture prevalent in India and the ineffective regulatory oversight. This landing(YouTube video) can be categorized as a deliberate attempt to endanger the lives of passengers and crew. This is not the Calicut landing but a landing at another critical airport where most of the year the airport experiences tailwinds. Since the airport has a unidirectional runway ( landing from one direction only), the flight crew has no option but to land in tailwinds. The situation worsens during the monsoons when there is a tailwind and the runway is wet and braking action reduces. Action has not been taken either by the regulator or by the airline safety. Why? What is the role of the regulator? The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) is the regulatory
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IndiGo flight followed a similar flight pattern and landed safely before the ill-fated Air India Express crashed

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An IndiGo AT-72 turboprop landed at Kozhikode airport 01hr45min prior to the ill-fated Air India Express B-737.  The IndiGo ATR followed a similar flight profile befoe landing on the easterly direction runway 10 at the airport.

The IndiGo ATR too attempted to land on the westerly runway 28 but discontinued the approach. The reason could be due to poor visibility in rain and/or low clouds obscuring the pilots vision in an attempt to acquire visual references of the landing runway.

The second attempt was carried out on the easterly runway 10, same as the Air India Express. 

At the time of landing, the prevailing visibility in rain was between 1500m-2000m. The instrument landing system which guides the aircraft through electronic ground based transmitter signals to 250 feet above ground requires the visibility of atleast 1300m or more.

The IndiGo ATR may have faced less severe weather and the slower turboprop may have been more forgiving. Nevertheless, this pattern can provide some interesting insights about the prevailing conditions and the interactions with the air traffic controller, who is the only eye and ears of the pilots on the ground.

Comments

  1. Anonymous9 August 2020 at 12:28

    You have not accounted for the Vertical and Horizontal profile of both the aircraft

    ReplyDelete

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