Safety lapse on AI Express flight had put lives at risk

A serious safety violation that jeopardised the lives of more than 100 passengers on board an Air India Express flight from Calicut to Muscat came to light on Monday.

A serious safety violation that jeopardised the lives of more than 100 passengers on board an Air India Express flight from Calicut to Muscat came to light on Monday.

Documents accessed by the Hindustan Times show that the flight’s commander allowed a trainee to occupy the co-pilot’s seat for a critical training session he was not authorised to conduct.

The incident occurred on April 24 last year. The documents show that captain DS Jain, the flight commander, gave line-oriented training (LOT) to captain A Jamwal, a trainee pilot on board the flight.

HT Image

According to rules laid down by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), the aviation regulator, only training captains are eligible to conduct LOT because it is a rigorous exercise. The airline failed to report the incident to the DGCA even after first officer J Nambiar brought it to the notice of the airline’s training and flight operations departments.

An Air India spokesperson denied passenger lives were put at risk. “There was no LOT imparted as the said co-pilot had 2,500 hours of experience on the Boeing 737-800 aircraft,” said the spokesperson.

When HT produced a copy of the pilot roster sheet stating that captain Jamwal was assigned by the airline’s flight-scheduling department to seek LOT, the spokesperson said the airline would need a day to respond.