By IANS,
New Delhi : A GoAir flight from Mumbai with 114 passengers on board made an emergency landing at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport Thursday evening after one of its landing gears developed a snag, a senior airport official said. All passengers and flight crew are safe.
The Airbus A-320 plane made an emergency landing at 1648 hours.
“The aircraft has landed safely. All passengers are safe,” said the spokesperson for the Delhi International Airport Limited (DIAL), which is developing Delhi’s IGI airport.
According to an airport official, the pilot communicated to the air traffic controller about the problem in the nosewheel of its landing gear around 1620 hrs.
“The pilot made a pass over the Air Traffic Control (ATC) tower for visual verification, and was told that the nosewheel was stuck. He rectified the problem while the craft hovered over Delhi for more than 15 minutes,” V. Somasundaram, executive director of the Airtports Authority of India who is also in charge of the ATC operations at IGI Airport, Delhi, told IANS.
Emergency services were, meanwhile, pressed into service at the Delhi airport.
But pilots say it is a common problem faced while flying an aircraft.
“Aircraft are very well designed and secured to deal with such eventualities. Even if there is a problem in landing gears, it can be rectified mid-air in most of the cases,” says a senior pilot of a private airline.
On July 26, a major air accident was averted at Delhi airport when a Jet Airways flight with Union Minister Sharad Pawar on board returned to Delhi airport safely after it was found that a rear door was not locked properly.