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Mangalore Air Crash

An Air India plane carrying 158 passengers and 8 crew members overshot the runway, barrelled through the sand pit, and left a “smoking hole” on the side of a cliff. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation in India has been charged with solving this mystery. There were only 8 survivors of the crash: four with serious injuries, 3 with minor injuries, and one with no injuries. Both pilots, experienced in many successful landings at the Mangalore Airport, were killed along with their crew and 150 passengers. Is this another example of pilot fatigue and pilot error? Too early at this point to determine, but the conditions at the time of the crash eliminate many possibilities:

• The winds were calm.
• It was not raining, and the runway was dry.
• The visibity was good at 6 kilometers.
• There were no previous malfunctions in the aircraft’s history.
• Both pilots had many successful landings at Mangalore Airport.
• They were landing on the longer (8000 ft.) runway and not the shorter (6000 ft.) one.
• There were no pilot trouble signals reported to the tower on the approach.

Praful Patel, India’s Civil Aviation Minister, told reporters at the scene that the runway was overshot by 2000 feet! His videotaped interview can be  found at ndtv.com and the Press Trust of India.

Will this tragic crash be attributed to the growing problems of pilot fatigue and sleep deprivation? Will more “smoking holes” and lost lives be required to address the world-wide problems? Only time will tell.

Copyright 2010. All rights reserved to Ronald Czarnecki.

Tags: accidents, airline disasters, crashes, fatigue, landings, pilot error, pilot fatigue, runway, sleep deprivation

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 22nd, 2010 at 11:45 am and is filed under Frozen in Fear, Sleepless and Tired, Worried and Stressed. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.