Hydraulic failure not cause of emergency landing of flights

Mumbai, Apr 10 (UNI) Preliminary investigations, conducted by Director General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) along with Air India officials in Monday's emergency landing of two Air India flights at Delhi airport, has revealed that hydraulic failure of AI 349 flight was not the cause, but there were certain technical issues related to landing gear equipment, which are being looked into to identify root cause of the failure.

AccordinG to a statement issued here today, Air India AI 349 Shanghai-Bangkok-Delhi-Mumbai flight was cleared off the taxi track today at 0530 hrs. The director engineering and quality control general manager along with senior AI officials rushed to Delhi from Mumbai with a special recovery kit and managed to tow the aircraft to the Air India maintenance hangar area.

The B767 aircraft, involved in AI-736 Dubai-Delhi flight incident, also resumed service for scheduled operation today after the problem with the landing gear indicator on the instrumental panel was rectified, the statement said.

In the first incident, the pilot of a flight from Shanghai, carrying 191 passengers reported problems in the plane's undercarriage. The aircraft hovered over the airport for more than two hours, before finally landing at the Delhi airport at 0745 hrs on Monday.

After the passengers were disembarked on the main runway, with the use of step-ladders, the airbus' nose wheel collapsed and got stuck in the soft turf when it was being towed for repairs.

In the other incident, an aircraft carrying 54 passengers from Dubai made an emergency landing at 0315 hrs the same day due to technical snag.

Consequently, both DGCA and the Air India had ordered a parallel probe into the incident.

UNI