Monk who grounded a flight

A Myanmarese monk grounded an Air India plane taxiing for take-off at Calcutta airport on Monday morning by “unintentionally” opening the emergency exit next to his seat.
Waza Thunga, allotted seat 11A on the Airbus 320 bound for Yangon, set off an alarm in the cockpit the moment he pulled the lever of the emergency exit to his left “out of curiosity”, airport officials said.
The alarm prompted the pilot to immediately abort the scheduled take-off at 10.10am and take the plane back to the parking bay, where all 139 passengers were asked to disembark. A befuddled Thunga and the rest of the passengers were escorted back to the transit lounge, where they were stranded for seven hours as the emergency door was put back in place and the plane put through safety checks. “Once an emergency door accidentally opens, the flight is said to be in a no-go situation. The plane cannot take off without a thorough check, and that takes time,” an air traffic control (ATC) official said.
The aircraft finally took off at 5.05pm, after Air India engineers ran a thorough check and gave the green signal.
A source said Thunga, who doesn’t know English and was travelling by air for only the second time, had difficulty explaining how the emergency exit opened. “But he managed to convince the airline staff that his was an unintentional act. So no action was taken against him,” he added.
Air India officials denied that the emergency door opened when Thunga pulled the lever. “He did trigger an alarm in the cockpit when the aircraft was in the parking bay but the door didn’t open and the flight was never in any kind of danger,” a spokesperson for the airline said.
The chute attached to the emergency exit was activated when the aircraft was taken for repairs, which added to the turnaround time. Once the lever is pulled, a cartridge is punctured and the escape chute is inflated with nitrogen gas. For the emergency exit to be used again, a refill of nitrogen is required.
24/11/09 The Telegraph

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Categories: Air India Domestic Nov 2009, Airports Nov 2009, NACIL Nov 2009, Safety Nov 2009