The ministry of civil aviation recently released the initial report submitted by the court of inquiry formed to investigate the Mangalore crash. The report, which has been uploaded on ministry of civil aviation's website, has the most embarrassing mistake that an air-crash investigation team must have ever made. It carries a picture of Mangalore airport's runways and wrongly shows runway 27 as runway 24.
The AI Boeing 737 had landed on runway 24 and then overshot it falling into a gorge. The investigation team has erroneously shown the crash site at the end of the other runway (runway 27). The aircraft did not land on this runway. The accompanying caption says, "runway 24 of Mangalore airport", but a picture of runway 27 is carried and the actual crash site, which is at the end of runway 24, is not even seen in that picture. TOI has carried the picture released by the investigation team and an another one which shows the actual site of the crash.
So how did the team of experts not bother to see that the runway that they marked ran in the east-west direction (implying its orientation to be 90 degrees-270 degrees and so it would have to be runway 09/27)? (North is 000 or 360 degrees and south is 180 degrees). It is the runway which lies in the southwest-northeast direction which is 06/24 (it's orientation is 60 degrees-240 degrees) and that is the one on which the Boeing 737 landed on that morning.
Getting the runway and the crash site wrong is such a serious mistake that it casts a doubt on the quality of the investigation report that will finally emerge. "It reflects how casual the Investigation team has taken the crash that cost 158 lives," said Capt A Ranganathan, an air safety expert. "It's quite embarrassing to wrongly mark the spot and the publicly release it on the civil aviation website. It's a real shame that they can publish something like this. It's a clear indication of why the truth won't come out," he added.
Incidentally, the court of inquiry is made up of a team of very experienced Indian Air Force and airline experts. Air Marshal (Retd) B N Gokhale, who has over 3,500 hours on various fighter and trainer aircraft and was a flying instructor, is the chairman of the court of inquiry. The assessors include Capt Ron Nagar, senior vice-president (flight operations and training), Kingfisher Airlines; S S Nat, deputy director, Directorate-General of Civil Aviation (DGCA); Babu Peter, former director (engineering), Air India and currently executive vice-president, engineering, in Go Air; Gurcharan Bhatura, air traffic management expert; and S N Dwivedi, DGCA, director of airworthiness.
The initial report does not say anything about the probable cause of the air crash. "During landing the aircraft departed the paved surface including the runway end safety area (RESA). The right wing impacted the localiser structure at the end of RESA. Thereafter, the aircraft hit the boundary fence, fell into the gorge and caught fire," the report said.
No comments:
Post a Comment