An area is seen inundated with rainwater at the airport amid heavy rainfall, in Chennai on November 30, 2024.
| Photo Credit: PTI
Weather system Fengal has exposed the Achilles heel of the Indian civil aviation system. On the night of November 29, Indigo flight 6E 5048, arriving from Mumbai around 8 p.m. at the Chennai airport, wobbled quite a bit on approach and floated over the runway for more than 4,000 feet before going around and making another approach to land. Because it was night, no one had taken a video to expose the incident on social media.
On November 30, 2024, another Indigo flight, 6E 683, coming in for a landing at Chennai, appeared fully out of control, touched down momentarily, and went around with its wing dropping sharply to the left. It managed to climb out, made another approach, and landed safely. A social media post showing the video of the incident went viral and as expected, the airline issued a statement, saying: “Our pilots are extensively trained to handle such situations with utmost professionalism!”
At the time of the incident, the Met forecast had given the wind direction as 010 degrees 15 kts gusting to 30 kts. The crosswind limit for an Airbus A320/321 is 38 knots, including gust. A crosswind from a 60-degree angle translates to 7.5 knots gusting to 15 kts as Cos 60 is half. Both flights landed safely, but did their first approach and go-around satisfy safety norms?
Anyone who has seen the viral video would have observed the poor handling of the flight by the pilot, laying bare the shoddy training standards of the airline. Were the crew lacking in experience or were they affected by fatigue and stress?
Manual flying skills
More than 15 years ago, international safety organisations identified lack of manual flying skills as a major factor in air accidents. We read about tail strikes and hard/rough landings regularly. Indigo has a policy of maximum use of automation and the two aforementioned events in Chennai reflect this lack of manual flying skills. The video on social media is proof of that.
All modern jet aircraft are fitted with Digital Flight Data Recorders that record several hundred parameters. Flight control inputs are recorded; the data are downloaded regularly and the flight safety departments of airlines are to analyse the data, identify the trends, and recommend corrections to pilots. The idea is to prevent accidents due to habits that develop when wrong inputs are made on a regular basis. It appears that trend analysis is not done diligently. Airlines’ Flight Operations Quality Assurance (FOQA) programmes need proactive identification to recognise the threats.
The runway surroundings of the Chennai airport were flooded at the time of the incident. During heavy rain, the water depth would have been more than 3 mm and the runway condition will come under the Contaminated Category. In contaminated conditions, the landing distance required is more than 325% of the dry runway requirement (source: Flight Safety Foundation ALAR toolkit data). Do airlines comply with this, though they all claim safety is paramount? When we filmed several landings and take-offs in heavy rain from close range using high-speed, high-definition cameras, it was noticed that the water depth was more than 50 mm. But the runway condition reported to pilots only mentions ‘wet’, which requires just a factor of 1.95%.
Pathetic conditions
On October 30, the taxi tracks at Chennai were closed due to flooding before they finally shut the airport down stating “hazardous conditions.” The rainfall at the airport (source: Greater Chennai Corporation website) on November 29 was 23.8 mm, November 30 60.2 mm, and December 1 123.8 mm. An airport that gets flooded with just 2 cm to 12 cm of rain shows how pathetic the conditions are. No wonder Chennai is losing its standing on the aviation map.
During a meeting on November 13, 2024, with the Director General of Civil Aviation on the implementation of the proposed norms on Duty Time Limitation for pilots, Air India said the new norms would hurt the interest of cockpit crew as their flying hours would be reduced, along with their allowances! Pathetic, that an airline would compromise safety to increase emoluments for pilots. Pilot bodies, meanwhile, have rejected this claim.
This throws light on the mindset of airlines in India, whose managements have no regard for fatigue-induced errors of cockpit crew.
Training standards
The DGCA Civil Aviation Requirement mandates that all pilots undergo one hour of ALAR (Approach and Landing Accident Reduction) and AWO (Adverse Weather Operations) ground training, followed by one hour of simulator training and another hour of simulator check. This is in addition to the four-hour recurrent training (two hours as pilot flying and two hours as pilot monitoring) and the four-hour check on the simulator. Do airlines comply with this strictly, and has the DGCA carried out strict monitoring of the same during their safety audits? There have been instances where boxes were ticked even without spending one minute on the simulator.
There is a DGCA requirement that the minimum total cockpit time on the type of aircraft has to be 500 hours. For example, if the pilots are flying an A320/321, the combined time of the captain and the co-pilot has to be 500 hours on an A320/321. To simplify, if the captain has 100 hours as pilot-in-command on an A320, the co-pilot must have 400 hours on an A320. This is a safety requirement. Are airlines complying with this rule?
With large-scale induction and accelerated training programmes, do airlines have the numbers to comply with this requirement? Earlier, the monsoon restriction was from June to September, but it was later modified to April to September. With global warming being a reality, we experience adverse weather conditions throughout the year. The DGCA must immediately make the minimum cockpit time on type all year long. It must also make it mandatory for airlines to store electronic records of the ALAR and AWO checks on simulators to ensure that pilots demonstrate their proficiency to the required standards. All simulators have this facility. When you find that a pilot cannot handle a 7.5 kts crosswind, it puts their training record in question. An electronic record will display all the deficiencies. Airlines should also encourage manual flying when weather conditions are good and traffic density is low.
Fengal has held up a mirror to poor standards at the Chennai airport as well as pilot proficiency. Do we need a fatal accident for governments to wake up?
Published – December 05, 2024 10:27 pm IST
