Big questions on safety, pilot training after 5 Indian planes veer off runway in 3 days
The aircraft involved are SpiceJet and Air India Express. Half the incidents occurred in wet weather, for which airlines have to ensure their pilots undergo specific training. There were no injuries reported in any of these incidents.

The incidents:

New Delhi: When the Pune-Kolkata SpiceJet aircraft, SG-275, veered off the runway at the Kolkata airport Tuesday, it was the fifth such instance in just 72 hours, between 30 June and 2 July.

The SpiceJet Boeing 737-800 that overshot the runway at Shirdi on 29 April had 164 people on board; all of them were safe. The aircraft overshot the runway by at least 50 m and came to a stop with all its gear on soft ground.

An Air India Express Boeing 737-800, Flight IX-384, on 30 June veered straight off the runway at Mangalore airport and came to a stop just ahead of the end of the runway after its nose gear went over a drainage ditch.

An Air India Express Boeing 737-800, Flight IX-382, landed hard at the Kozhikode airport on 1 July, with its tail making contact with the runway before it rolled on without further incident and taxied to the apron.

This is yet another instance of a SpiceJet aircraft overshooting the runway in wet weather. A SpiceJet Boeing 737-800, Flight SG-6237, on its way from Jaipur ran off the rain-slickened runway 27 at the Mumbai International Airport on 1 July forcing the closure of the main runway.

The latest runway incident involving SpiceJet came Tuesday when SG-275 from Pune to Kolkata landed on runway 19L and veered off towards the right due to heavy rain. Pilots took corrective action immediately to get the aircraft onto the centre line but four-runway edge lights were damaged.

“This points to very poor training and safety standards at SpiceJet and AIE,” said Captain Mohan Ranganathan, an aviation safety consultant and a former instructor of the Boeing 737 specialising in wet runway operations training.

“It also points to DGCA turning a blind eye to serious safety issues. The DGCA is being a facilitator for airlines and not a regulator.”

Source: ThePrint

Austrian air navigation service provider Austro Control and German aerospace research centre DLR are testing at Vienna airport specially erected panels near a runway threshold as part of an effort to reduce aircraft wake vortices and shorten separation between arriving flights. The structure consists of a series of roughly parallel panels – approximately 9m (30ft) long and 4.5m tall – which have been installed in the approach area of runway 16, close to the instrument landing system's localiser antenna. While wake vortices at altitude tend to quickly descend, drift away and dissipate, they can hover for "some time" near the ground, DLR says. "The very first evaluations of the new measurements in Vienna show that the wake vortices near the [panels] decay noticeably faster," states Frank Holzapfel of DLR's Institute of Atmospheric Physics. The test in Vienna is scheduled to run until September. But DLR says that work is under way with its partners to design and install a permanent structure by 2021.

Sources: FlightGlobal

Another SpiceJet aircraft suffered a runway excursion, the second such incident in two days. On 1 July evening, one of the airline’s Boeing 737-800 overran the runway at Mumbai Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj airport after landing in heavy rain. The aircraft was operating flight SG6237 from Jaipur. SpiceJet says there was no injury to the passengers or crew, and that everyone was evacuated “normally”. As a result of the incident, the airport’s main runway, the 3,660m-long 09/27, had to be shut down. The airport operator tweeted that operations to restore services on 09/27 could take up to 48 hours.

Source: FlightGlobal