Air India Pilots Avert Plane Crash & Save 370+ Lives After Major Systems Failure

Watching airplanes take off from the ground and fly across oceans and mountains still seems magical. But, despite that feeling of awe, every passenger wants to get on a plane and reach their destination safely. And that feeling is also shared by the plane’s crew and pilots. Now, most of the time, everything goes according to plan. However, there’s always that 1% chance of things going south and an Air India flight happened to fall in that category.

According to NDTV, pilots Rustom Palia and Sushant Singh (left and right, respectively) were flying a faulty Air India Boeing 777-300 over New York on September 11th. Palia said to Air Traffic Control (ATC) that,

“We’re really, you know, stuck and there’s no fuel. Basically, we’ve got a single source radio altimeter, we have a Traffic Collision and Avoidance System failure. No Auto-land, no windshear systems, (no) Auto Speed Brake and the Auxillary Power Unit is unserviceable as well.”

This particular Air India flight originates from New Delhi and it’s a non-stop 15-hour flight to New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. It had 370 passengers on it and the pilots had tried and failed to land it during deteriorating weather conditions.

However, that was the tip of the iceberg. The worst part was that the plane’s Instrument Landing System (ILS) receivers had malfunctioned. Which means that the pilots had no assistance on how to align the jet during landing. So, the conversation between ATC and Palia went something like this,

This meant that the pilots had to land the Boeing, which is one of the most sophisticated airliners every designed, manually.

Finally, after assessing the number of people on board (370) and fuel in the tank (7200 kg), Air India-101 was directed to land at an alternate airport in Newark.

In order to land the plane, the pilots would’ve to fly extremely low and keep descending in the approximate direction of the runway without knowing its exact location. And since Boston, Albany or Connecticut was too far away and the fuel was too low, they would have to take the chance at Newark, even though they could see little to nothing.

So, with no Instrument Landing systems, the pilots took a “non-precision” approach with the help of the few navigational aids that were functional. This meant using an out-of-box approach that they were never taught and is neither mentioned in the operational guidelines of the Boeing. And despite those odds, Singh and Palia managed to land safely 38 minutes after the plane had first started to malfunction.

Although Air India has refrained from commenting on this incident, we hope that they’re doing a thorough investigation of this matter so that it doesn’t happen again. Because 370 lives isn’t a joke and if it wasn’t for Singh and Palia, we would be waking up to a very different headline today.

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