The recent incident, on December 5, 2024, involving an Air India Airbus A320 aircraft at Goa’s Mopa airport is another wake-up call for Indian aviation. The crew of the Hyderabad-bound aircraft had to reject takeoff after entering a parallel taxiway instead of the main runway. This is not the first time an event such as this has happened to airlines in India. This falls under the category of runway confusion. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), the regulatory body that primarily deals with safety issues, as we have seen during the past 20 years, will blame the pilots and sweep the report under the carpet. The blame, squarely, points to the regulator and the airlines. It has failed to learn from earlier events.
The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO)’s Annex 13 makes it mandatory for a member-state to investigate accidents, serious incidents and also incidents and identify the cause and take corrective steps to prevent a recurrence.
Series of incidents
The history of runway confusion errors by Indian carriers is long. In 1993, a Jet Airways Boeing 737 inaugural flight to Coimbatore landed at the Sulur air base of the Indian Air Force instead of Peelamedu civil airport. In September 2002, a Jet Airways Boeing 737 landed on the taxi track in Dabolim airport in Goa. In June 2007, a Spicejet Boeing 737 landed on the wrong runway at Delhi. In December 2008, a Spicejet Boeing 737 landed on a wrong runway at Kolkata. In March 2009, a Jetlite CRJ landed on a wrong runway at Kolkata. In September 2018, an Air India Airbus A320 on the Delhi-Thiruvananthapuram-Male sector landed on a wrong (under construction) runway in the Maldives.
Just a month earlier, a Jet Airways Boeing 737 had to abort takeoff while on a taxiway at Riyadh in Saudi Arabia. In January 2014, an Air India Boeing 787 almost landed at Melbourne’s Essenden airport before air traffic control directed the crew to Melbourne Tullamarine airport. And in December 2020, a Spicejet Boeing 737 had a hard touchdown short of the runway threshold in Guwahati, Assam.
Had the DGCA and the airlines concerned taken proactive and corrective steps, India would not have to cut a sorry figure in international aviation. India is lucky that none of these events resulted in fatalities. The blame is apportioned to pilot error while the airlines and the regulator walk away without accountability.
In June 2010, in the first meeting of the Civil Aviation Safety Advisory Council (CASAC), formed after the Mangaluru crash of an Air India Express flight (May 2010), this writer had highlighted some of the events, between 2002 and 2009, in a presentation before the Union Minister of Civil Aviation. If such serious incidents are still taking place in 2024, the blame falls squarely on the Ministry of Civil Aviation, the DGCA and the airlines for their failure to prevent a recurrence.
Singapore took corrective measures
Contrast this with an incident involving a Singapore Airlines flight in Taiwan on October 31, 2000. The crew were trying to expedite their departure before the airport closed due to a typhoon. They took off from a wrong runway which had been partially closed. The aircraft crashed into construction equipment, exploded in a fire and several passengers died. It was night, in heavy rain and with strong winds. Singapore took corrective measures and there has not been a serious incident till date. Can India not learn from them?
Airlines in India have had a repeated number of accidents involving high and fast approaches, resulting in runway overruns since 2005. In October 2005, an Air Sahara Boeing 737 went off the runway at Mumbai and there was serious damage to the aircraft. In March 2015 a Spicejet DH8-D sustained damage during a runway excursion on landing in Hubli. In July 2019, a Spicejet Boeing 737 overran the runway in Mumbai on landing and was damaged. In December 2016, a Jet Airways Boeing 737 went off the runway at Goa after a rejected take off
A majority of those aircraft have resulted in hull losses and some such as the Mangaluru and Kozhikode (2020) crashes have resulted in the loss of 179 lives. In all those overrun accidents, pilots have been blamed but never the poor training and safety standards of airlines, the non-compliance with ICAO standards on aerodrome infrastructure and the failure of the DGCA’s and Airports Authority of India’s safety audits that have covered up serious deficiencies. The Flight Standards Directorate of the DGCA — which is supposed to oversee standards — has failed miserably, as it is the same type of accidents that have occurred and aircraft have been written off.
Pressure on crew
India has one of the worst set of regulations on flight and duty time limitations for flight crew. Pilots and cabin attendants are pressured to operate in violation of flight time limits, flight duty limits and rest periods. The new addition to pressure on flight deck crew is the hydra-headed monster called “on time performance”, or OTP. Many of these errors can be attributed to the OTP pressure and failure of crew resource management in the cockpit.
In the Kozhikode crash, the captain was in a hurry to land because he was required to operate the next day’s flight. The accident is a classic case of “press-on-it is” where, once the pilot gets fixed on to the landing strip, no inputs are received from the other pilot. The same happened in the Mangaluru accident. Repeated calls by the co-pilot to go around were ignored.
The incident, in Mopa, Goa, shows a lack of knowledge of runway markings by the pilots. Runways and not the taxi track have specific markings. Pilots landing short is also an indication of a lack of knowledge of runway markings and non-compliance of stabilised approach criteria. Airline training and safety departments should wake up and address these serious training deficiencies.
India has to move from the old adage,“If a pilot is alive, blame him. If he is dead, bury him”. The recent deferment of flight and duty time limits at the behest of airline managements is a serious safety issue. To add fuel to the fire is a High Court decision asking the DGCA to negotiate with the two sides to find a suitable solution. Safety and fatigue are not negotiable. This is another instance of the judiciary having no clue about aviation safety.
Captain A. (Mohan) Ranganathan is a former airline instructor pilot and aviation safety adviser. He is also a former member of the Civil Aviation Safety Advisory Council (CASAC), India
Published – December 30, 2024 12:16 am IST
