Plane starts moving without closing door

With the aerobridge coupled to aircraft, pilot ordered ‘pushback’

MUMBAI: Air India’s pre-dawn flight AI 640 from Mumbai to Chennai was delayed by five hours on Thursday after a door of the Airbus 320 was damaged in a freak accident. The flight, whose scheduled departure time was 3:15am, was already late by an hour when the incident occurred.

All the passengers were seated in the plane, which was parked at bay 49 of Terminal 2C at Sahar airport, and rescheduled to fly at 4:30am. The cabin crew had not closed the doors and the aerobridge was still coupled with the plane, when the commander mistakenly ordered the ground crew to begin pushback - the aeronautical term for towing the plane to the main taxiway.

According to an Air India source, the crew had only closed the front door, L1, near the cockpit. The rear door, L2, was still open. As a result, the door hit the aerobridge and suffered minor damage. The pushback was immediately halted and passengers were deplaned. “The problem was rectified and the flight took off at 8:15am,” an Air India spokesman said.

The source said it was a lucky thing the front door had been closed, or the damage would have been worse. Both the doors and the aerobridges would have broken down, rendering the aircraft immobile, the source said.

In a similar incident on May 12, a JetLite aircraft was pushed back, though the aerobridge of the rear door had not been removed at Santa Cruz airport. More than 100 passengers were on board flight S2 655 for Goa then. The horizontal stabiliser of the plane’s left wing was hit by the stepladder. The aircraft had to be grounded.