United, Saudi aircrafts in near-miss

Two passenger aircrafts, one from Bangladesh and the other from Saudi Arabia, narrowly avoided a mid-air collision over the eastern Indian city of Jamshedpur early on Monday, it has now been revealed.

Officials say one of the pilots wrongly acted on a command from Air Traffic Control (ATC) that was not meant for his aircraft.

The incident took place around 8.30am on Monday morning.

The aircrafts were not to land in Kolkata; rather they were over-flying the Kolkata sky on way to their respective destinations.

Sources at Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International (NSCBI) Airport in Kolkata said that three passenger flights -- a Saudi Arabia Airlines flight from Hong Kong to Jeddah, an United Airways (Bangladesh) flight from Muscat to Dhaka and an Emirates flight from Dubai to Dhaka -- were flying through the Kolkata Flight Information Region (FIR) on way to their destinations.

The three aircrafts were flying at some 30 to 40 nautical miles distance from Kolkata and were very close to Jamshedpur.

The ATC at NSCBI Airport was regulating the flights.

In course of managing these flights, an ATC radarscope operator sent a command to the Emirates flight to descend in the sky from the level the aircraft was flying then. But instead, the pilot of United Airways flight picked up the command and took down his aircraft by some 300 feet.

That brought the aircraft very close to the Saudi Arabian Airlines flight and a collision appeared imminent.

It was then that the Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) of both the flights automatically got activated, sending an emergency alert to the pilots.

The pilot of the United Airways flight, with instruction from the Kolkata ATC, ascended quickly and thus narrowly averted a mid-air collision.

"The minimum vertical distance between two aircraft should be 1,000 feet whereas the United Airways flight had come as close as 700 feet to the Saudi Airlines aircraft. But for the TCAS, the consequence would have been disastrous," said an official at Kolkata ATC.

The eastern regional executive director of Airports Authority of India, S Bhaduri said that a high level investigation has been ordered into the incident to find out whether it was the mistake of Kolkata ATC or the United Airways pilot who acted on the command meant for Emirates.

"The probe is being conducted by the Air Traffic Safety Investigation Team that has ATC, DGCA and Aviation Safety representatives in it," he said.