Around 30 flight incidents occur per day in India, majority have no safety implications, says DGCA chief

New Delhi, July 6: About 30 flight incidents happen every day in the country and a majority of them have no safety implications, Arun Kumar, chief of aviation regulator DGCA, said on Wednesday. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) issued a show-cause notice Wednesday to SpiceJet after its planes had eight technical malfunctions over the past 18 days.

In a statement on Wednesday, Kumar said: "On an average, about 30 incidents do take place, which includes go around, missed approaches, diversion, medical emergencies, weather issues, bird hits, runway incursion, runway excursion et al."

"Most of them have no safety implications. On the contrary, they are sine qua non (essential condition) of a robust safety management system," he added. In its show-cause notice to SpiceJet, the DGCA said the airline has failed to "establish safe, efficient and reliable air services" under the terms of Rule 134 and Schedule XI of the Aircraft Rules, 1937. In an interview with PTI on Wednesday, SpiceJet CMD Ajay Singh said that a lot of incidents that are being reported are relatively minor in nature and happen to every airline.

"This is nothing unique," he added. ''When you have thousands of flights, sometimes the air conditioning will fail, sometimes a bird will hit the plane, and sometimes a fuel indicator will light up. "These things are going to happen and, of course, we have to minimise that to the greatest extent possible. That is our job and it is the regulator's job to push us to make things better, which we will do," he noted.

On Tuesday, a SpiceJet freighter aircraft, which was heading to Chongqing in China, returned to Kolkata as the pilots realised after the take-off that its weather radar was not working. On the same day, the airline's Delhi-Dubai flight was diverted to Karachi due to a malfunctioning fuel indicator and its Kandla-Mumbai flight did priority landing in Maharashtra's capital city after cracks developed on its windshield mid-air.

Like SpiceJet, IndiGo and Vistara also suffered technical malfunction incidents on Tuesday. An engine of a Vistara aircraft on its way from Bangkok failed after it landed at the Delhi airport but all passengers disembarked safely, officials of the aviation regulator DGCA said on Wednesday.

When approached for comments, the airline said the integrated drive generator (IDG) on the engine developed a "minor" electrical malfunction after it landed at the Indira Gandhi International Airport on Tuesday. The cabin crew of an IndiGo Raipur-Indore flight observed smoke in the plane after it landed at its destination on Tuesday, officials said. PTI