Manoj K Das/ENS
Kochi, Apr 18: About 300 passengers on board two aircraft escaped by the skin of their teeth last week when a Bahrain-bound Gulf Air flight and a Kozhikode-bound Air India flight missed a sure mid-air collision by just 10 seconds over the Kozhikode skies.
And as it turns out the investigating agencies are yet to pinpoint those responsible for it even a week after the incident, with the air traffic control towers in Thiruvananthapuram, Kozhikode and Mangalore indulging in a full-fledged blame game. It is a sad commentary on the state of affairs in the Indian skies that there is even an attempt to brush the incident aside saying “it actually happened over no-man’s land”.
Top sources told this website's newspaper that the Gulf Air flight took off from Cochin International Airport and flew left over Kozhikode to enter the M300 route to the Gulf sector. It was climbing to its cruising altitude and was at 15,700 feet when the Air India flight was descending on the M300 from 16,000 feet to landing altitude. “There was hardly 400 feet between the two aircraft. Considering their speeds it wouldn’t have taken more than five to 10 seconds for them to fly into each other,” top aviation sources told this website's newspaper.
Unconfirmed reports state that the TCAS anti-collision warning alerted the pilots and “they activated the standard drill and ensured the safety of the passengers and the aircraft”. The Gulf Air pilots immediately informed the Mangalore tower and lodged a formal complaint based on which the Airports Authority has started an investigation.
Prima facie, sources said, the responsibility lies with the T’Puram and Mangalore towers. The Gulf Air aircraft was under the control of the T’Puram ATC after it soared above 15,000 ft (all aircraft movement above that height in Kerala skies is the responsibility of T’Puram, while the Kochi tower handles aircraft below that ceiling.) The T’Puram tower claims that it had already handed over the aircraft to the Mangalore tower as it was moving out of its VHF range. But the Mangalore tower says the two aircraft came face to face before it actually began exercising control. “But we need to identify what caused the confusion. This shouldn’t happen again to leave us all regretting it with standard ‘if-only’ statements,” a top official said.