Jet Airways pilots suspended for low-fuel landing

The Directorate General of Civil Aviation has suspended two Jet Airways pilots in connection with the unsafe landing of a flight at the worldwide airport here without mandatory reserve fuel requirement. The flight was to land at Kochi but finally landed at Thiruvananthapuram after declaring “Mayday’ which is aviation jargon for dangerously low fuel”.

At the time of landing, the Boeing 737 aircraft had only 270 kg fuel left.

The airline regulator has stipulated that an aircraft should have enough fuel for the entire trip and for taxing, any contingency (5 per cent of trip fuel), sufficient fuel to get to other airport and enough holding fuel for half an hour, which is 1,300 to 1,500 kg of fuel.

Following the incident, DGCA is now reviewing the fuel uplift policy of the airline to examine whether it was carrying less fuel to save costs, they said.

The incident has also been referred to Air Accident Investigation Bureau.

“The plane could have dropped like a stone if it were on full power” said a DGCA official.

“The aircraft tried to land in Kochi thrice but due to bad weather, heavy rains and low cloud cover could not do so”. Even at Thiruvananthapuram, the runway was not visible and the pilots took another three rounds of the airport, losing fuel. “The DGCA is investigating why didn’t the pilots follow the specifications”, said the official.

“The official explained that the flight was scheduled to land at Kochi”. The flight landed safely in Trivandrum at 7.10am and subsequently departed Trivandrum to Kochi after visibility improvement at Kochi.

It adds that at the airline “safety is of paramount importance, and to this end, planning of flight operations are conducted with a very high level of safety”.

“This includes a fuel uplift that not only meets all regulatory requirements, it has additional buffers to cater to unexpected scenarios including poor weather at the alternate airport”, the statement added.

In their flight plan, the pilots mentioned Bangalore as the alternate airport when ideally Thiruvananthapuram should have been the alternate since it is closer. “Since the matter is under investigation by the airline safety team as also the DGCA, we are unable to comment any further on the matter”, the statement said.