Co-pilot ‘blanked out’ as aircraft dropped 7,000 ft in Dubai-Pune flight’s mid-air scare

New Delhi: Initial inquiries by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation into the May 26 incident of an Air India Express plane suddenly plunging 7,000 feet while on autopilot has revealed that the co-pilot had “blanked out” when the flight commander took a break to go to the toilet.
The sequence reconstructed by the preliminary inquiry shows that the commander of Dubai-Pune flight IX-212 too failed to follow the standard operating procedure of putting a flight attendant in the cockpit when he went to the toilet.
Realising that something was amiss, he apparently rushed back and knocked on the cockpit door, but there was no response.
When repeated knocking elicited no response, he punched in the code on the door and entered the cockpit, the commander is learnt to have told the DGCA. He found the autopilot disengaged and the co-pilot unable to bring the plane under control.
The co-pliot has apparently claimed that he did not know how the autopilot got disengaged. Sources said he seemed to have frozen on controls — asked why he failed to take obvious measures after the autopilot was disengaged, he has claimed that he “blanked out”.
02/06/10 Pranab Dhal Samanta/Indian Express

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