Your pilot: I’m not qualified to land

London: Flight BE1431 was thousands of feet above the ground when the pilot remembered something.
He grabbed the intercom and announced: “I am not qualified to land the plane.”
Passengers looked at each other with what the British, with typical understatement, would call “surprise”.
It’s unlikely anyone was reminded about the joke: “This is your Captain speaking, you are at 35,000ft and I hope you are having a lovely time. I am also having a lovely time – in the airport bar.”
Which was good because BE1431’s British pilot was not joking.
It was all very technical but the pilot had decided, barely 20 minutes before landing in a foggy Paris, that although he was very experienced, he did not have the rating necessary to bring his turboprop aircraft down. Not in that fog, oh no.
Unlike the pilot in the joke, though, he was in the cockpit and if he couldn’t land the machine he could jolly well fly it. So, BE1431 flew all the way back to Cardiff.
Passenger Cassandra Grant, flying for a job interview, was not pleased. She had booked with Flybe, a British airline based at Exeter International Airport that operates over 150 routes between 50-odd European airports. But BE1431 was jinxed by fog, just as many flights have been in Calcutta and elsewhere in India this week.
It should have left Cardiff at 8.45am yesterday but was almost three hours late taking off because of fog around the Welsh capital. Once the fog cleared in Cardiff, the plane took off but it then became too foggy to land in Paris. Pilots need extra training to land in poor weather.
Grant told her local newspaper, the South Wales Echo: “The captain said, ‘Unfortunately I’m not qualified to land the plane in Paris. They are asking for a level two qualification and I only have a level five. We’ll have to fly back’.”
Grant said: “The whole thing beggars belief. If I had not been on the plane, I would not have believed it.”
British pilots believe the Flybe pilot behaved correctly and that “passengers should be grateful to him”. This show of loyalty, however, does not explain why the unnamed pilot was placed in command.
But an Indian airline source said instead of returning to Cardiff the pilot should have asked to go to an “alternative designated airport”, waited there and then flown to Paris when the fog cleared. “The pilot did absolutely the wrong thing.”
19/12/08 Amit Roy/The Telegraph

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Categories: Airports Dec 2008, Foreign Dec 2008, Safety Dec 2008