Mumbai: A near mishap involving an Air India flight that put lives of more than a 100 passengers at risk in 2009 has come to light now. In a major safety breach, the pilots of the Air India flight did not report the incident and nor was it picked up by the airline’s safety monitoring team which is supposed to monitor the flight data recorder, which is part of the black box, of every flight.
Hindustan Times has accessed documents showing that passengers on board Air India flight IC 693 from Mumbai to Bangkok on November 19, 2009 had a narrow escape when the flight hit turbulence and climbed 1,500 feet above the permissible height.
The vertical separation between two flights mid-air should be 1,000 feet. With the AI flight breaching that, there was a strong possibility of it crashing into another flight travelling at a higher altitude.
The flight’s crew report states that crew members and passengers fell off their seat during the turbulent 90 seconds. The graph also shows that the aircraft’s autopilot had failed soon after it hit turbulence and the pilot had to manually bring it back to the normal altitude. The pilots, however, did not report the incident.
16/04/11 Soubhik Mitra/Hindustan Times
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