- All-lady crew saves the day after mid-air revelation of loss at take-off
June 10: As the Air India
plane took off from Silchar airport amid a drizzle, ground staff saw
something drop from the sky. It was one of the ATR-42 aircraft’s nose
wheels.
The 48 Guwahati-bound passengers
learnt about it about half an hour later. Ratu Hazarika clearly
remembers the on-board announcement that set off “the scariest moments
of my life”.
“The crew asked us
to fasten our seat belts and announced the plane might have to make an
emergency landing because of a technical snag. It created panic inside
the aircraft,” the divisional sales manger with pharmaceutical company
Akumentis Healthcare told The Telegraph.
Eventually, Flight
ATR 9760 touched down safely after circling over Guwahati airport for
nearly an hour to burn up fuel and reduce the risk of a fire, with
ambulances and fire engines lining the runway.
None among the
passengers or the all-female crew of four — two women pilots and two
airhostesses — was injured, but Hazarika said the 65-odd minutes since
the announcement were nerve-wracking. Soon, the cabin crew began giving
safety demonstrations relating to emergency landings and fires.
“An airhostess
told us some emergency situation was anticipated and the plane might
even have to land in a river. She showed us how to use life jackets,”
the Guwahati resident said.
To Payal Jain
Agarwal, a 35-year-old jewellery designer from Surat who was travelling
with her two young sons and mother, it seemed like a nightmare. “They
showed us the emergency exits and told us we might need to run or jump.
For a moment, it seemed like I was watching a disaster movie,” she said.
Two passengers
fainted. “There was a lot of turbulence and the plane shook violently
while landing,” Hazarika said. “When it touched down safely, I felt as
if I had been given a second life.”
A pilot and
aviation trainer, Samar Desai, said there wasn’t really much risk
provided the “standard procedure” for landing with a damaged nose wheel
was followed.
“In such a
situation, a pilot is expected to land on the main landing gear (the
wheels under the wings) and keep the nose in the air, using air brakes
to generate drag and reduce the aircraft’s speed,” said Desai, who
handles Indian operations for an aviation college in Australia.
“The goal is to slow down the aircraft as much as possible before the nose wheel touches the ground.”
As the pilots
burnt up the excess fuel, it also reduced the plane’s weight: a crucial
step for a safe emergency landing. The crew moved the luggage to the
rear to shift the centre of gravity further to the aft and away from the
nose.
Sources at
Guwahati airport said the ATR-42 planes that Air India uses in the
Guwahati-Silchar sector are mostly old and poorly maintained. They said
this aspect was being investigated.
The passengers did
not know what exactly the problem was till after the landing, said
Agarwal, who was travelling to Guwahati for a “family function”. She
described how her horror increased with every titbit of information and
every assurance.
“First, the
airhostess stressed the correct sitting posture during landing, leaving
us wondering what was amiss. Prodded, she said there was some problem
with the landing systems,” Agarwal said. “Then they started moving the
luggage, saying this was for our safety. Then came the bolt from the
blue: the announcement about an emergency landing.”
She added: “They
issued a slew of dos and don’ts: don’t panic, don’t get up, move to the
closest exit on landing, don’t carry your belongings....”
But Agarwal
praised the cabin crew. “All along, they were very calm and composed,
attending to the fainting and panic-stricken passengers, offering them
water and helping them relax.”
When the crew
assured everyone that ambulances and fire engines were standing by, “all
kinds of thoughts were going through my mind, like what was going to
happen next, how to tackle a fire, what would happen if we had to
jump.... Everyone was praying.”
Eventually, no
emergency medical help was needed. After the plane landed, the
passengers cheered loudly and shook hands with pilot Urmila Yadav and
co-pilot Yashu.
Moloy Dutta, a
senior air traffic control (ATC) official in Guwahati, praised the
Silchar ATC for promptly informing the pilots and Guwahati as soon as
the wheel mishap was noticed. Several other airports in the region —
Imphal, Dimapur, Agartala, Tezpur and Aizawl — too prepared for an
emergency landing.
“We asked the
aircraft to fly lowpass (low) so that the ground engineers at Guwahati
airport could see what the problem was,” Dutta said. “Good piloting
helped avert a disaster.”
Chief minister Tarun Gogoi called up Yadav to say: “Hats off to you and your co-pilot.”
The errant nose wheel, retrieved from the runway, has been kept at Silchar airport.
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