A rookie air traffic controller just earned a medal for narrowly preventing an Air India disaster (thanks, Ennis). On July 24 last year, an Air India pilot landing at Newark Airport forgot to extend landing gear and came within half a mile of crashing the 747 on its belly. Was anyone you know on that flight?
I love it when desis take the initiative to cut through red tape, such as landing checklists with exaggerations like EXTEND WING FLAPS and LOWER LANDING GEAR. Bah, more unnecessary government regulation. You go, tiger!
One afternoon four years ago… out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a Comanche coming over the threshold and preparing to land. The aircraft’s landing gear was still up… my trainer told me, ‘Look for feet (landing gear). Always look for feet on the (propeller-powered aircraft). The prop guys don’t have the warning systems, but the jets will always have feet.'”
Fast forward to the afternoon of July 24, 2004… “We had a (Boeing) 747 coming in,” he said. “You can point out a 747 easily on a clear day.” It was Air India Flight 145, with 409 passengers aboard.
“He was on five-mile final approach,” Dittamo remarked. “I saw him but I couldn’t see gear.” With his Fort Lauderdale trainer’s instructions in his head – ‘Always look for feet’ – Dittamo glanced in a different direction and then turned back to the 747 to look again. No gear. “I thought, ‘something just doesn’t seem right,'” he said. “In my mind, I said I would pick it up in my next scan. But then I looked up and the plane definitely had no gear.”
By this point, Flight 145 was on a half-mile final at an altitude of 600 feet. “I was surprised he didn’t go around,” Dittamo stated. “I was going to let it go for one more second, because this was a critical phase of the flight for the crew. But then I just said to myself, ‘I’m not going to let this go for any longer.'”
Dittamo keyed the mike: “Air India 145, check gear down. Gear appears up.” The pilot acknowledged the transmission with a calm, “Air India 145.” Down came the gear and the 747 landed safely on Runway 4R.
NEWARK TOWER…DITTAMO: Air India 145 heavy, check gear down, gear appears up.
AIR INDIA 145: Air India 145.
(UNIDENTIFIED): Good call tower.
NPR shares stories of purposely suicidal pilots. Some are sad stories of lonely death in darkness:
Some pilots have engaged in poignantly ambiguous dialogues with controllers. One took off at night in a 182 and climbed past 21,000 feet before reporting to an ATC controller that he was out of fuel. The controller directed him to an airport, but the pilot remarked, “I prefer water.” As he glided down, the pilot, whose use of language is endearing, continued to speak of a water landing: “All things considered,” he said, “I think that would be the best place to go.” At another point he said, “As you might have guessed, I have not had a good day… I’m going swimming tonight.” Indeed, he had not had a good day; he had been involved in a fatal hit-and-run accident the night before, and there was a warrant out for his arrest. He crashed in darkness into a frozen reservoir.
Another pilot was doing touch-and-goes in a Seminole when he suddenly asked the tower controller to copy down a phone number. “You don’t need to use it…yet,” he said. “It looks like one more option and then a full stop.” He flew another circuit, then asked the controller to call the number and “let them know where I’m at, also, if you could, tell my family and friends that I love them very much.”
“Were you going to depart out of here or stay the night?” the controller asked, still unaware of the double meaning of the conversation. “I’ll stay the night,” the pilot said, and added a few seconds later, “It would be a good idea to get airport rescue and fire fighting out here too please…”A more laconic pilot… approached his home runway very high. The tower controller asked whether he would be able to get down and land, and the pilot replied, “This will be my final landing.” He pushed the nose over, increased power, and dove into the runway.
Good on him… but, my cousin has been working for Air India in Delhi for over 15 years and has never received a thing for any of his “great saves”. He accompanied former PMs on foreign visits, identified potentially fatal problems with aircraft, handled virtual riots at the airports and so the list goes on. Abhe yaar, thodese medals idhar bhi…
All government regulation is bad. Consumers can sort things out without the government getting involved. If Air India gets into a crash, they’ll simply go out of business, people wont fly them any more. All red tape and government rules are bad. The free market alone leads to optimal social outcomes.
Jai Invisible Hand! Free Market Zindabad!
Haha! Freidman would say that.
Adam Smith in da house, everybody say self interest…
Socialism would have prevented this. Rules, govt management of the economy, floggings and gulags ensure that every man works for the benefit of every other man. In fact, it’s because India has moved away from this teaching that this incident happened in the first place.
If it weren’t for this infernal economic growth, we wouldn’t have to worry about so many airline passengers in the first place.
Somebody please forward this to Air India, and maybe the Indian press ! They could use the publicity 🙂
Funny you should bring that up. This was on the Beeb today:
Fri May 20, 2005 12:40 PM GMT+05:30 BOMBAY (Reuters) – An Air India flight bound for Paris made a safe emergency landing in Bombay on Friday after reporting a technical problem, an airport official said.
It is obvious that the crash of an aircraft carrying 409 passengers due to a careless mistake represents an enourmous waste of human capital. It would also lead to safety concerns and a drop in the demand for air travel.
Some government regulations are necessary to prevent such errors and maintain a healthy economy.
I fail to understand how this reflects the efficiency of Air India?
Um, satire?
i hate air india..flew with them once, never again, old planes, sucky service.. whatever.. it’s like your death wish.
Ain’t no obligation to fly them, Falafel. Open skies baby, you have ever growing options. My dad flies AI and AI only. Country plane taking him home, supporting the domestic economy and all that. Humara Bharat maan… Jai Hind!
Why AI pilots are so snobbish?
” Did anybody find out from the commander of the flight if for some reason he had deliberately not deployed the landing gear at the normal height? Why is it taken for granted that it was a mistake ? In addition to the ‘Three Green’landing gear down and locked lights there are two other independent alarms provided on the flight deck to warn the the pilot if he attempts a gear up landing. Good luck to the controller for the medal he was awarded but don’t jump to conclusions without first verifying all the facts.
At a 747’s landing speed of 125 mph, 0.5 miles out, there are only 14 seconds left until touchdown. It takes 8-9 seconds to extend the landing gear. Most passenger airliners extend gear several miles before landing.
The alarms issue is puzzling, presumably they were either broken or silenced, or the pilots were distracted.
THREE warnings missed when landing without an emergency or weather problems – now come on. Possible but most unlikely.
The Air Trafic Controller’s eyeballs need to be recalibrated. When there is a go-around option available no sane pilot would even consider landing with 5 seconds to touchdown after deploying the gear.
There’s more to this than meets the eye.
My guess is the landing gear warnings were busted or disabled.
The plane was at just 600 feet, which AFAIK the controllers can see via radar. This controller said the plane had just 10 seconds to touchdown, and he was surprised the pilot didn’t do a go-around. Here’s the NPR transcript.
there r 3 no gear warnings given by GPWS sys on a 747, the last 1 being a non-silencable alarm
Is the above incident really true????????
and a friend were to end our trip to India with AI137 from Delhi to Frankfurt on 9/24/05. Of course there were also hundreds more passengers, Indians, Germans, Italians, Swiss and Belgian. The flight was supposed to take off at 7:30am. After sitting in the jet a while the pilot let on that there was a problem with the brakes and he would not fly it. He announced that the plane we could see to our right would be used instead and we would continue to that one without needing to go through security again. This never happened and it was announced that another jet was being flown in for us. This never happened. No Air India employees could provide real information on when we would really be able to take off.
After sitting around 5-6 hours on the jet we were herded off to various gates a while for the brakes to be worked on. At this point a friend requested a blanket for me because I had a high fever and chills in the cold airport and was simply told NO!
At 1pm we were again herded into a filthy bus (at least the one I was in) and to the Centaur Hotel. My room had a wet mould stain growing in one corner. At 11PM more busloads of people arrived and we were carted back to the airport – according to AI because we had a flight at 1AM.
We boarded a plane many hours after 1AM and this also didn’t take off. The pilot still refused to fly it. (Apparently no other jets are available in Air IndiaÂ’s entire “FLEET”)
After being shuttled around more gates we were told to collect our baggage and we would be carted back to the Centaur again. The moving of baggage made it easy for at least one of our passenger’s luggage to be picked off by thieves.
One of the Indian nationals got a hold of a reporter from NDTV who met us out front of the airport and we did a TV interview in hopes of making Air India ashamed enough of their behavior to provide another plane.
After the interviews ran Air India became much friendlier and sent out 3 reps to Centaur to get us on Lufthansa flights. (43 hours later?)
I hope that India Tourism realizes that now there are HUNDREDS of tourists whose stories of abuse and mistreatment are going to spread and prevent others from going or returning to India. Unless Air India can redevelop at least the most BASIC of “Customer Service” structures and learn to respond to problems and attend to them (in less than two days).
If this had happened due to a natural disaster or a military incident I could have some understanding. This happened due to sloppiness, stupidity, lack or organization, training and customer service skills.
It is impossible to sleep while something like this is going on so the effect on physical and mental health is enormous. Both of us lost a day of work each and were exhausted for the first day of work we were able to go to. Total delay was almost 48 hours and I am sure that no one would have done anything if we hadn’t gotten on television.