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India
Engines On Fire! 3 Emergency Landings In A Single Day Puts Indian Aviation Industry Under Spotlight
|Sunday was not a good day to fly, with bird strikes forcing two flights to return to their starting points and one flight being hit with a cabin glitch. The recent mishaps raise questions about flight safety and air travel.
Three flight mishaps were reported on Sunday, June 19, from different states, two of which were due to bird mishaps, and one was due to a glitch in cabin pressure. Of them, two were Spicejet aircraft while the third belonged to Indigo air carrier.
Patna-Delhi Spicejet
A Boeing 727 Spicejet aircraft with 185 passengers had to make an emergency landing at Patna's Bihta Airforce Station after its left wing caught fire. A carrier official added that a bird had hit the left engine of the flight, causing it to catch fire and damaging three fan blades, which caused the emergency landing after following the standard procedure.
Captain Gurcharan Arora, the Chief of Flight Operations of SpiceJet, said that only the people on the ground and the Air Traffic Control (ATC) had noticed the fire, and there was no indication of it in the cockpit. All the 185 passengers were also reported to be safe and properly evacuated. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has also confirmed that a bird hit led to the failure of Engine 1 on the Patna-Delhi SpiceJet aircraft, as reported by NDTV.
There were also videos, shot by locals, of the sparks coming out of the left engine. The official also added that it was a normal takeoff, with no cockpit indication, and soon after that, they received a call from ATC saying that they had detected smoke and flames from Engine 1. Once the cabin crew noticed sparks, they informed the Pilot-in-Command, who requested an emergency landing, as reported by India Today.
Bird hits are very common, with them happening almost every month on various flights. The official added that it's usually a thud with no damage to the engine when the bird hits the airframe, and since passenger flights are very "rugged and reliable", passengers don't even get to know about it. But in this case, the bird flew directly into the engine, causing three fan blades to get damaged and flames and smoke to emerge.
He also added that aeroplanes could fly safely for up to three hours with only one engine after they lose the other, but safety regulations require them to land within 60 minutes.
Delhi-Jabalpur SpiceJet
In another incident on the same day, a SpiceJet flight from Delhi to Jabalpur had to land back at the Delhi Airport after reaching a height of 6,000 feet due to proper cabin pressure differential not being reached even after attaining that height.
The cabin pressure differential is the difference between the pressure inside the aircraft cabin and outside the aeroplane. It usually has an engineered and measured limitation that helps to avoid overstressing the cabin, like overinflating a balloon and maintaining that proper pressure is significant for safety, as reported by Mint.
The SpiceJet Q400, which was operating flight SG-2962 from Delhi to Jabalpur, had failed to regain the cabin pressure differential even after attaining the altitude of 6,000 feet. A spokesperson of SpiceJet Airlines said that the cabin crew "observed cabin pressure differential was not building up along with rising in cabin altitude." He added that the aircraft was levelled off at 6000 ft., and the proper pressure differential was not regained, which led to the return of the flight to the source airport.
Guwahati-Delhi IndiGo
In a similar incident of a bird hit on the same day, a Delhi-bound IndiGo flight from Guwahati had to return and land back in Guwahati after a bird was suspected of having hit it after the takeoff. Due to the inconvenience, all passengers aboard the flight were accommodated on another Delhi-bound flight, as reported by NDTV.
The IndiGo Airbus A320neo (VT-ITB), which was operating flight 6E 6394 from Guwahati to Delhi, is also being inspected on-ground after it made the emergency landing in Guwahati.
Questions On Flight Safety
The mishaps in aviation safety are making the general public reconsider the complications of flying from place to place. The issues of safety were usually linked to trains a few years ago, with the chance of trains getting derailed or caught in fire, and flights seemed like the safer and quicker option. But with more development in the aviation industry and more routes and airports opening up in smaller cities, more safety concerns have also risen, which the airlines need to take cognizance of for their consumers.