As a reporter, I had the misfortune of covering two airline accidents. One, India’s worst ever; the other—pardon me for saying so—the best ever.
First about the best ever. To beat a pilots’ strike in 1993, Indian Airlines had wet-leased foreign airplanes, complete with crew, to fly domestic routes. One such bird, an Uzbek Air Tupolev-154 flying in from Hyderabad piloted by a Russian, crashed in Delhi on a foggy January morning.
I reached the airport, still fog-thick, within an hour and half of the crash, and joined the crowd of scribes. We were briefed by airline staff, airport managers, and civil aviation worthies. They gave us all the basic info they had—the plane, its age, the crew, the passengers, the approach path, the glide path, the limit of visibility, the traffic at the hour, the various categories of fog landing, and what they knew had happened—the plane had veered to the right on touch-down, the right wing scraped the asphalt, the plane tilted, the tail broke away….
Next they ferried us to the wreck, let lensmen click from a safe distance, and answered more queries.
Imaging: Deni Lal
Why did I call it the best ever? Because all the 165 passengers and 13 crew members lived to tell us tales. We had even some comic relief. As we were being briefed on the tarmac, there walked in a middle-aged sardarji flashing his boarding pass and looking for his luggage in the mangled wreck!
The other is a tragic tale—of India’s worst ever. A Saudi Boeing-747 taking off from Delhi with 300-plus passengers collided with a chartered Kazakh Air Ilyushin-76 coming in to land with 30 people around 6.40pm in November 1996. A colleague and photographer rushed to Charkhi-Dadri village where the wreckage had fallen; I was assigned to do the airport and DGCA rounds.
At 9.30pm, three hours into the crash, civil aviation director-general H.S. Khola briefed us with whatever he knew at that hour—about the pax, the crew, what had happened at what moment, the flight path, the glide path, why planes landed and took off in the same direction, and even about the lack of airborne collision avoidance system (ACAS) in most planes.
Four days later, aviation secretary Yogesh Chandra, flanked by Khola and others, held a detailed briefing. They played the recording of the trialogue between the ATC and the two planes, and also gave us copies of its transcript. That gave us a total picture of what had happened—which plane was where at which moment, how many nautical miles, who was asked to climb, who was asked to stay course, who was to descend, how many feet, how each was alerted about the other, why the same corridor was used for entry and egress, lack of a double-directional runway, how various radars work, how ATC handles vertical and horizontal separation, what are o’clock positions—everything and anything about airplane navigation and ATC management. We left the hall feeling like rookie aviators.
Khola also made a public vow—by next year-end he would ensure no plane lands on terra firma indica without ACAS. The man kept his word, making Indian airspace collision-free.
Why am I telling these old scribes’ tales? Because, India has had the second worst air disaster three weeks ago and we are still groping in the dark. There is no official word yet except the first day’s basic press statement from the DGCA, and snatches of info given out afterwards—such as who would probe the crash, where would the black box be checked, and so on.
The result? Armchair experts and fake newsmakers are ruling the roost, and saturating the air space.
prasannan@theweek.in