Scare for pilot on Colombo, Chennai AI flight

By V.P. Raghu and Sridhar Kumaraswami

Chennai/New Delhi, April 24: A collision alert warning on an Air India Colombo-Chennai Airbus A-320 flight on Wednesday evening me-ant a few tense moments for the aircraft commander and the cockpit crew before air traffic control could rule out the possibility of a mysterious unidentified flying object in nearby airspace.

The Airbus captain reacted fast when the aircraft’s traffic collision avoidance system (TCAS) gave a "resolutionary alert advice", which indicated the possibility of a collision with a mysterious aircraft or a flying object, which might be as close as 300 feet.

Well-placed civil aviation ministry sources in New Delhi said the TCAS in the Air India aircraft sounded an alert, after which the pilot immediately contacted air traffic control. The ATC made a quick check and concluded that there was no other aircraft in the vicinity.

The pilot was then asked to reboot the aircraft’s TCAS, upon which the alert disappeared, sources said. "It has to be checked whe-ther the TCAS system in the aircraft was defective and why the alert went off when there was no other aircraft in the vicinity," the sources said. The aircraft was 60 nautical miles from Chennai when the TCAS alert went off.

Air India spokesperson Jit-endra Bhargava said the airline had ordered an inquiry into why the TCAS alert went off. "The passengers were not in danger since the ATC had found that there was no other aircraft in the vicinity," he said. The director-general of civil aviation, Mr Kanu Gohain, when contacted, said that if there had been a TCAS alert, it would have been reported to the DGCA’s Chennai office. "We will examine the matter and see what is to be done," he said.

Sources in Chennai said the incident occurred when the aircraft was at a height of 30,000 feet. Air India officials in Chennai acknowledged the incident, but refused to divulge any details. ATC officials in Chennai also refused to confirm or deny the incident.

"There were 103 passengers on board Flight IC-574, which took off from Colombo at around 5.40 pm, nearly two hours and 40 minutes behind schedule on Wednesday. The flight commander was Captain D.K. Rajeev. He initially received the ‘traffic advice’ alert, indicating that there was an object on his route which could be on a collision path with the aircraft. When he received a resolutionary advice alert — which indicates that the collision is imminent — he activated the traffic collision avoidance system," a source in Chennai said.