The incident has also exposed the airline’s shoddy maintenance. An airline spokesperson said “matters relating to aircraft maintenance will be probed by the airline officials."
The shocking incident of an Air India Boeing 747 aircraft catching fire due to fuel leakage at Mumbai airport on Friday has set alarm bells ringing in the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) as the aircraft was given an airworthiness certificate just three days earlier.
The incident has also exposed the airline’s shoddy maintenance. An airline spokesperson said “matters relating to aircraft maintenance will be probed by the airline officials.” For DGCA, the incident has come as a shock since the initial assessment points to lapses by the airline. “The airline staff failed to notice the fault in the aircraft and allowed it to fly,” said an official.
The fuel leakage faults could be due to bursting of joints on the fuel supply line connecting engines and the fuel tank. “The Pilot Defect Report (PDR) will tell everything about the defects in the aircraft,” said a source.
Airline sources say that three different aircraft were readied for the AI flight bound for Riyadh and all of them developed faults. The flight was scheduled to take off at 1am, then 5am and finally 10am. “The first two aircraft developed snags and then the third one was used for the flight, but that one developed the worst kind of fault — engine catching fire due to fuel leakage,” said a source.
The DGCA team has started investigation and grounded the pilots as well as the aircraft engineer involved in giving final clearance. The investigators are also looking at the pilots’ role. Sources said the pilots were inattentive to the various indicators for fuel, fire and smoke. When the aircraft was taxiing towards the runway, another AI pilot had noticed the leak and tried to contact the Boeing 747 pilot but he could not contact him.“This pilot tried establishing contact with the Boeing pilots in a special frequency which is exclusive for the airline. But it was later found that the Boeing pilots had turned the volume low,” said a source.
Luckily, an airport employee in a jeep also spotted the fuel trickling out of the aircraft wing and alerted the control tower, which then instructed the Boeing pilots to switch off the engine. “During all this while, the pilots were clueless about the fuel leakage even though the indicator should have alerted them. Also, nobody knows who opened the left door of the aircraft when it was known that the left engine had caught fire,” said a source.
DGCA’s airworthiness certificate also comes under scrutiny because of the subsequent serious defects in the aircraft. “The airworthiness department of the DGCA is short-staffed. For the entire western region, that includes Mumbai, Delhi, Jaipur, and Nagpur, there are only 20 inspectors. And Mumbai airport alone has 650 flights daily,” points out a retired pilot.
A DGCA official from Mumbai agrees that the shortage of staff is hampering their work. “With just 20 AW inspectors in the western region out of a total of 120 across India, it becomes really difficult to do surveillance work. Although the civil aviation ministry has given permission to fill 400 vacancies, nothing has been done yet. As such we are under-staffed,” he says.
Friday’s incident underlines the need for stringent air safety checks by the airlines as well as the DGCA.
(With inputs from Naveeta Singh in Mumbai)
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