Two passenger jets were seconds from colliding at Mumbai airport in India as one landed at the moment another was taking off. Footage of the incident appeared online and showed an IndiGo plane landing on a runway at the major airport, and an Air India jet departed from the same runway just seconds later. Officials from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation confirmed that an investigation is underway and that the air traffic controller responsible had been suspended from duty.
An Air India spokesperson said that flight AI657 was cleared for take-off and continued per standard procedures. The spokesperson would not make further comment except to state that authorities were looking into the appropriateness or otherwise of the take-off clearances.
Similarly, an IndiGo spokesperson said flight 6E 6053, having traveled from Indore, was scheduled to land in Mumbai, and the pilot dutifully followed the instructions from air traffic control as usual.
Alok Yadav, general secretary of the Air Traffic Control regulatory body, ATC Guild India, agreed that an investigation is warranted but isn’t immediately convinced that the fault lies with the air traffic controller. He said dozens of planes take off from that runway every hour, and even higher numbers can be accommodated in good visibility. “In this incident, it appeared that the departing aircraft had already reached B2 speed and was nose-up while the arriving aircraft was touching down,” Mr. Yadav said.
An air traffic controller’s primary role is to ensure that aircraft can take off, fly, and land safely. Despite the closeness of the planes in this instance, Yadav suggests both were safe, so the air traffic controller’s job was done.
Controllers are regulated through a variety of national and international bodies, and in the US, by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), part of the Department of Transportation. It oversees 14,000 air traffic controllers handling 10 million scheduled flights annually, flying almost 3 million passengers daily. FAA air traffic controllers monitor 5,000 flights at any given moment.