Cyclone Fengal exposes poor standards in Chennai airport, pilot proficiency Premium

Fengal exposes flaws in Indian aviation system, raising questions on pilot training and airport safety standards.

Weather system Fengal has exposed the Achilles heel of the Indian civil aviation system. On the night of November 29, Indigo flight 6E 5048, arriving from Mumbai around 8 p.m. at the Chennai airport, wobbled quite a bit on approach and floated over the runway for more than 4,000 feet before going around and making another approach to land. Because it was night, no one had taken a video to expose the incident on social media.

On November 30, 2024, another Indigo flight, 6E 683, coming in for a landing at Chennai, appeared fully out of control, touched down momentarily, and went around with its wing dropping sharply to the left. It managed to climb out, made another approach, and landed safely. A social media post showing the video of the incident went viral and as expected, the airline issued a statement, saying: “Our pilots are extensively trained to handle such situations with utmost professionalism!”

At the time of the incident, the Met forecast had given the wind direction as 010 degrees 15 kts gusting to 30 kts. The crosswind limit for an Airbus A320/321 is 38 knots, including gust. A crosswind from a 60-degree angle translates to 7.5 knots gusting to 15 kts as Cos 60 is half. Both flights landed safely, but did their first approach and go-around satisfy safety norms?

Anyone who has seen the viral video would have observed the poor handling of the flight by the pilot, laying bare the shoddy training standards of the airline. Were the crew lacking in experience or were they affected by fatigue and stress?

More than 15 years ago, international safety organisations identified lack of manual flying skills as a major factor in air accidents. We read about tail strikes and hard/rough landings regularly. Indigo has a policy of maximum use of automation and the two aforementioned events in Chennai reflect this lack of manual flying skills. The video on social media is proof of that.

All modern jet aircraft are fitted with Digital Flight Data Recorders that record several hundred parameters. Flight control inputs are recorded; the data are downloaded regularly and the flight safety departments of airlines are to analyse the data, identify the trends, and recommend corrections to pilots. The idea is to prevent accidents due to habits that develop when wrong inputs are made on a regular basis. It appears that trend analysis is not done diligently. Airlines’ Flight Operations Quality Assurance (FOQA) programmes need proactive identification to recognise the threats.

The runway surroundings of the Chennai airport were flooded at the time of the incident. During heavy rain, the water depth would have been more than 3 mm and the runway condition will come under the Contaminated Category. In contaminated conditions, the landing distance required is more than 325% of the dry runway requirement (source: Flight Safety Foundation ALAR toolkit data). Do airlines comply with this, though they all claim safety is paramount? When we filmed several landings and take-offs in heavy rain from close range using high-speed, high-definition cameras, it was noticed that the water depth was more than 50 mm. But the runway condition reported to pilots only mentions ‘wet’, which requires just a factor of 1.95%.