Air India flight enters Indigo runway at IGI

NEW DELHI: A serious miscommunication between IGI airport's air traffic control (ATC) tower and Air India pilots on Tuesday morning saw some tense moments and led to a close shave for two aircrafts. An incoming flight was asked to go around after the safety distance area of the runway it was to land on was breached by another plane waiting to take off.

Around 10.15am, an IndiGo Airbus A-320 was on its final approach to Delhi. At the same time, an Air India Boeing-777 was taxiing to the runway to operate a special Haj flight to Srinagar.

While taxiing, the AI aircraft crossed the holding line of the runway on which the IndiGo aircraft was to land. Noticing this "runway incursion", the air traffic controllers asked the pilots of the IndiGo flight to abort landing and initiate a go-around maneuver. "We did what ATC asked us to do. Safety was not compromised," an IndiGo spokesperson said.

The directorate general of civil aviation (DGCA) is probing the incident and will find out what led to the runway incursion-whether it was an error on the part or air traffic controllers or if the AI pilots failed to follow instructions.

ATC sources said the Air India pilots were told to wait at the holding line of the runway they were to use but they crossed it. Due to this, the IndiGo flight was asked to abort landing. "It was not a safety scare as the AI plane had just crossed the stop line. It was an incident but not a serious one," said an ATC expert.

Air India sources, on the other hand, said their pilots did as they were asked to by the ATC. "Our B-777 was going from the Haj terminal and had to take off from a specified runway. The pilots were asked to change from one taxiway to the other which requires them to cross another active runway. When the ATC tower realized that our plane had crossed the safety line of that runway, they must have asked the other plane not to land there," said a source.

After the IndiGo flight aborted landing, the AI plane took off for Srinagar. The Air India pilots filed a report on the incident after returning to the city.

The DGCA will also examine the ATC's tapes of the conversation with the AI pilots to determine what exactly led to the error. ATC keeps recordings for some months while the cockpit voice recorder is a loop which records over and over again after every three hours or so. Since the plane travelled from Delhi to Srinagar and back, the conversation between the pilots and ATC was erased from the cockpit voice recorder.