Air India Express B738 crash

[HAWK21M]

Don't believe whatever you see/read in the media.....Let the Investigation get concluded.

[stealthone]

What was the name of the late copilot? The rumour has it that the ilfated aircraft was piloted by two captains. The expatriate captain was activated to replace a local first officer. Can somebody state the age, experience and rank of the other pilot involved. His name and particulars are omitted by the media.
Thanks.

[starvingcfi]

'Well sorry about the misunderstanding. Your handle and number of posts led me to think you were a starving chief flying instructor on light aircraft.

I'm a bit perplexed by what you said on the Afriqiyah thread.

Half way down the runway and you're still coaxing the Libyan pilot to not force it on. This is odd, but I wasn't there. Would you care to expand on that, specifically the reasons why. I'm just left with what you wrote.'


no problem. you're not the first. i've been using this name since i was a starving cfi in 2002. chose to keep the name rather than change it every time i move to new equipment...starving402pilot, starvinghawkercaptain, starvingchallengercaptain.

i delivered the aircraft to the libyans and stayed to fly with them for 2 months while they gained experience in type. the morning i touched down in tripoli was the last time i was allowed to touch the controls. they never once offered a leg (even though i was clearly bored sitting in the right seat) and i never asked.

in hindsight, continuing the landing was a poor decision on my part. had i been in the left seat, we would've gone around and tried again. in reality - had i been in the left seat, we would've been on speed in the first place.

anyway, we had flown several trips by this point and i was thoroughly unimpressed with their skill set. this must have been our first instrument approach to the east and i made sure he knew we needed to be slowed and configured prior to the final approach fix, or else we would never get down and be on speed. as we zoomed toward the final approach fix, he asked for flaps 10. i should have reiterated the fact that we needed to be slowed/configured, but i'm one to let people learn from their mistakes. we hit the FAF, started down, and began configuring on speed.

as we crossed the fence, we were well over ref. however with an 11,076 ft runway, a landing distance of less than 2500 ft (usually the case), and the speed bleeding off nicely...i elected not to push for a go around. he was very clearly considering pushing the nose down to force the plane on the ground before it was ready. my concern was wheelbarrowing. i'm not sure how a tail strike would be a valid concern at that point.

again, i should've told him to go around...or elected to go around for him. i didn't. lesson learned.

[Wannabe Flyer]

List of Crew members:

1. Capt Z Glusica, Commander
2. Mr H S Ahluwalia, First Officer
3. Ms Sujata Siddharth Survase, Crew
4. Mr Yugantar Rana, Crew
5. Mr Mohammad Ali, Crew
6. Ms Tejal Anil Kamulkar, Crew



H.S Ahluwalia Age 42 3750 hrs. Apparently was being upgraded to commander next month

[TopTup]

To answer a question put to me:

I resigned. I fought the management culture and attempts to coerce and force me to change a fail grade I gave a pilot who could not land the 777 sim flying on raw data with 15 kt crosswind. He crashed it, twice.

I gave the reasons for my resignation to my agency, the airline, the airline's safety / standards department, DGCA and later sent in a report to the FAA.

So what has changed? Nothing. What will change? Nothing. I'll bet that my reports and paperwork were or either are burnt, lost or at the bottom of one of the many rooms packed 6+ ft high, wrapped in pink ribbon.

[shanx]

TopUp,

All that you have written about Air India (despicable standards, corruption, smoking in cockpit, pathetic culture, bribing to pass sim checks even after trainee crashing sim twice etc) must be sent to the media.

The travelling public must know what they are paying for.

Anyone in this forum with some good contacts with Indian media ? (Times Now, NDTV, Headlines Today, CNN-IBN etc ) ??

[Kockar]

Sure that it depends of weight (we don't have that info), winds (tail? - don't know that eather) type of tarmac, was it dry or wet, flaps, auto brakes... but after looking at this I am thinking a bit of "They could stop that plane even overshooted thr. by 2000feet - on dry" ?!? Still they had 6000ft + almost 200 ft off. Or they missed the touchdown point by 2000ft? As I saw on Google Earth, most of the landings are done from 1000 to 2000 ft from threshold, ok, different types of a/c. But... still....

flaps40


flaps30


Sorry, If I am totaly wrong, I'm so unfamiliar with this a/c.

[TopTup]

Shanx (and others),

Do you not think the media knows this? The management at AI knows this, the TRI / TRE's know this, the pilots themselves know this? Do you not think the TRE who arrives at the sim 1.5 hrs late knows he is? That he knows he is doing the wrong thing when he fraudulently completed DGCA and AI report? That the "Training and Safety Dept" calling in pilots to change their assessments and reviews KNOW they are doing the wrong thing?

They actively CHOOSE to do nothing! The regulatory authorities KNOW THIS!!! Go to the SE Asia Forum and see the utter resentment I and others have received by posting such issues previously. There are calls of racism, of "if you don't like [Incredible] India then get out!.....We don't need you damn foreigners when we have 4000 pilots with CPL's [175-200 hrs TT] qualified to do your jobs!" And, there is great pressure to bring this about.

I am so unbelievably sorry to be of the opinion that this will happen again, and again throughout the world so long as standards and safety are compromised for personal gain, incompetence and share market advances.

Hey, lets not just look at AI. What of the Dash 8 accident into Buffalo recently? Have the FDTL's, training or standards been improved there? We all read the reports, the conditions, the experience, the fatigue, etc, all attributing to that accident! Oh the media attention! The outrage! The heated conversations amongst pilots! Yesterday's news. Michael Moore's documentary.....Has anything changed?

So, tell the media, the DGCA, the FAA what? Something they know and refuse to acknowledge or prefer to ignore? Look at the media frenzy already: blame the expat. Look at "us professional" pilots on this forum: "I can hand fly and aircraft from..... Well you're wrong because automation is there for a reason...... Well if I was there I would have....."

NOTHING WILL CHANGE. And that is the saddest part of this entire accident.

No one will willfully open the can of worms and expose what goes on there. AI will have to be opened and investigated thoroughly. It won't happen. Raw, utter corruption and (criminal) negligence.

[Graybeard]

This one has a lot of similarities to the AA crash in Jamaica last year. They were even BAe HUD equipped on that one. Does AI have HUD on theirs?

GB

[fireflybob]

TopUp et al, never mind reporting the media etc but surely the insurance companies would be interested in the information you have?

Would any insurance company be happy to provide cover give these alleged huge lapses in safety?

[PT6A]

Boeing did an audit of Air India and found many many failings... these reports are also available... if anyone finds someone who would care to look!

[ManaAdaSystem]

Sqawk7700,

Have you ever been to India? Where else can you be on final and be told by ATC to go around due "Visibility below minima"? You tell him you have the whole airport and runway in sight, but "Negative, visibility below minima, Go around! I'm not talking about shallow fog here.

Or you sit at the gate, "negative start up, RVR 300 meters". But we can see from the gate and almost to the end of the runway, so it's at least 2000 meters? "Negative, RVR 300 meters, negative start up!"

It's not about Swiss cheeses, it's about plain stupidity! And it's about procedures you'll only find in India.

Tks SPD33bd, I had a good laugh when I read you Calcutta story.

[White Knight]

Quite right MAS - sitting in Calcutta waiting to push back - whole airfield and the distant threshold of 19R plainly visible. 'STANDBY, RVR 200M'... Idiots

[White Knight]

Originally Posted by protectthehornet

And does your airline allow you to dispatch with all autopilots inop? I've gone all day with no autopilot, or autothrottles (yes in jets...DC9/737) and I kept my situational awareness and ate a calzone all at the same time.

Clever boy Your attitude is real cowboy stuff I did my cowboy stuff when I was younger and more stupid (first 4000 hours without AP thankyou) - seems you haven't grown out of that kind of thing..

Besides - AP not available by MEL is one thing, just handflying (from TOD too which I think is totally POINTLESS) for the sake of it is another.. Handflying the approach is fine if rested, good F/O, quiet ATC etc but more often than not it's very busy at my homebase and at the end of a 12 hour duty (16 hours if on ULR) too - handflying is not the way to go...

Sorry to digress folks but I can't understand this guy's operation at all......

[ManaAdaSystem]

JetScreams, care to give a source for your cut and paste?

Flight Of Accountability

There has been a lot of discussion in the media regarding foreign pilots (also known as “expat pilots”) in the aftermath of the tragic air accident at Mangalore. The Minister of Civil aviation, many bureaucrats, airline officials and even a few journalists have gone to great lengths to explain how experienced foreign pilots hired by Air India and private airlines are essential to the Indian aviation industry. A retired spokesperson of Air India, who has no business to speak on behalf of Air India anymore, has been repeatedly appearing on television to painstakingly explain how important foreign pilots are to the company. Clearly the air disaster at Mangalore with a foreign pilot at the controls has made a lot of powerful people worried .Very worried.

The point however is not whether foreigners should be allowed in Indian carriers or not. Some of them are highly experienced and respected professionals who have undoubtedly made a huge contribution to the Indian airline industry. This article is not about them. It is about a shady scheme on gargantuan proportions, backed by government policy and a well oiled system that feeds on unimaginable corruption, on a scale that would astonish every innocent fare paying air passenger.

Air India is a government run Public Sector Undertaking and thus, it is assumed that rules applicable to other government institutions meant to keep corruption under check would apply to it too. The Ministry of Defence, for example has strict rules debarring the involvement of private middlemen or brokers in facilitating defence contracts. Other ministries have strict guidelines on the recruitment of qualified personnel or consultants where a transparent tendering process has to be adhered to.

In the case of Air India and its subsidiary Air India Express, such rules do not seem to apply at all.Some years ago, the ministry of civil aviation that ran erstwhile Air India and Indian Airlines, cooked up unrealistic passenger growth projections and placed massive aircraft orders for Air India and Indian Airlines. Private airlines only too eager to float shares to rake in public money and capitalise on the hype jumped in the bandwagon. Overnight, hundreds of vacancies for pilots were created.

Air India began hiring foreign pilots in 2003.Other reputed companies like Singapore Airlines and various Gulf Airlines such as Emirates, recruit foreign nationals too but with great transparency. Foreign pilots hired by them are a part of the regular workforce and are directly hired, without involving middlemen, on local terms. European airlines do not hire non EU nationals.

In Air India’s case, no global tenders were floated for foreign recruitment firms and no advertisements in newspapers announcing vacancies for foreign nationals appeared. Bureaucrats and officials in Air India, hand in glove with their counterparts and politicians in the Ministry of Civil Aviation, Ministry of Labour, Home Ministry, Ministry of External Affairs and other agencies hastily cleared the proposal to hire foreign nationals and the policy of recruiting foreign pilots was established. Politicians of opposition parties were roped in and a cosy arrangement was made.

To bypass opposition from its own employees and to circumvent elaborate transparent recruitment procedures and various laws, a defunct subsidiary, Air India Charters Ltd was revived and used as the vehicle to issue foreigners contracts. Hence the hundreds of foreign pilots in Air India and Air Express are routed through Air India Charters Ltd through recruitment firms and then using a legal loophole, deputed to Air India and Air India Express.

Private firms comprising middlemen and brokers, with the respectable title of “Aviation Consultants” were approached and many of these, such as Rishworth Aviation, Parc Aviation and scores of others appeared out of the wood work. Overnight, new consulting agencies sprang up, some in murky tax havens like the Isle of Man and Channel Islands.

All suddenly began to offer “experienced” pilots from all parts of the world. Many of these foreign pilots had and continue to have no clear track record. Some claim to have thousands of hours of flying experience in countries as diverse as Russia and Rwanda. Some of the airlines and countries (such as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia) that these pilots flew in do not even exist anymore. No background checks are carried out by either Air India or the Indian Government. Strangely the agency of middlemen, or “consultant” supplying the pilots, is entrusted with this task.

Lucrative contracts were tailor-made to lure foreign pilots in droves. Decades of rules meant to harass Indian pilots such as stringent medical standards were waived off by the government for foreign pilots. Air India’s pilots who are Indian nationals, have to undergo a DGCA medical test known as a Class I medical examination and then are again subjected to an elaborate company medical test known as a Pre Employment Medical Examination (PEME).None of these apply to foreign nationals in India. For example, an Indian pilot may not be allowed fly an Indian passenger aircraft wearing a pacemaker but a foreigner most probably would because the medical standards in his country allow it.

There have been cases where Indian pilots who are permanently medically grounded by Indian authorities get foreign citizenship and foreign licences and return to India to fly planes on “expat” terms. Atleast two such “foreign” pilots have served Air India on such a contract. Infact foreign pilots flying Indian registered aircraft are not even required to have Indian flying licences! All they had to do is produce “proof “of experience and a foreign licence and the DGCA issues a “temporary authorisation”. Such “proof” of experience could be a fake certificate or a fake rubber stamp but nobody carries out a background check.

A foreign pilot is not legally answerable to the Indian DGCA since he does not have an Indian Licence. The DGCA can neither revoke nor suspend his flying licence. Technically, an Indian Co Pilot involved in a serious air accident may lose his flying licence and his job; whereas the pilot, if he is a foreigner can take the next flight home and start life on a clean slate!

To prevent the foreign pilots from coming under the ambit of direct taxes in India, the pilots are “officially” based in foreign countries such as Dubai and not given “local” terms of employment. Every month Air India pays the foreign recruitment agencies the salaries of these pilots along with a commission or “consultancy fees” to foreign bank accounts. This is turn trickles back to the various politicians and officials who patronise the system. Not surprisingly, a foreign pilot who recently approached Air India for a job recently was asked to route his application through a recruitment agency!

As a result ,hundreds of crores of income tax that would have normally gone to the Indian Income Tax Department through TDS had these pilots been based in India, is diverted to foreign bank accounts in foreign countries.

Liaison officers” and “advisors”, meant to “facilitate” business interests, are regularly appointed by these foreign recruitment agencies to “liaise” with the various ministries and departments. Two of Air India’s senior most executives have retired in the past one year and have joined such firms as “liaison” officers. Another, a retired CMD, continues to show great personal interest in negotiating foreign pilots’ contracts on behalf of recruitment agencies.

Foreign pilots are provided more leave, sometimes upto ten days in a month – the justification being that they need to go home to be with their families. Indian pilots flying for Air India Express are made to go on postings for fifteen days at a stretch and given one day off at their home base. Ironically these Indian pilots spend three to four days every month with their families and the foreigners (who could be from neighbouring Nepal or Dubai) spend more than a week to ten days every month on holiday.

Foreigners also get paid a higher salary and are entitled to five star hotel accommodations even when not flying. As a result, hundreds of hotel rooms are booked by Air India at exorbitant rates – a percentage of which presumably flows back to some officials.

This murky system in Air India of the past seven years has quietly gone unnoticed. As long as flights took off on time and passengers reached their destinations nobody really cared. Unions cried themselves hoarse- only to be drowned in the din of the money power of powerful lobbies and an ill informed media often hesitant to upset a mega industry that generates lucrative advertisement revenue .

The air crash at Mangalore need not have necessarily been caused by an incompetent foreign pilot. This article is not meant to disrespect the majority of foreign pilots in India. But the larger issue of rampant corruption and greed must be addressed immediately. Little wonder that all the officials in the dishonest food chain are now working overtime to cover up the issue. Sadly the one hundred and fifty eight innocent people that have been killed cannot speak for themselves anymore.

Therefore we, the rest of the nation, must stand up in one voice to demand a CBI enquiry to unravel the mess. We cannot afford to wait for another air disaster to prove the politicians, bureaucrats and officials wrong. Because the next time a shady foreign pilot from strange country with a dubious qualification or medical history crashes a plane, you and I could actually be on it.

It would not be our Indian pilot friends who cooked up this stew of half truths, lies, envy, rubbish and blame, would it?

[Rigid Rotor]

ManaAdaSystem – you are quite right about some terrible controlling by Indian civil ATC controllers – I remember a recent air-test in a helicopter at a small civil airfield – we were climbing to FL 100 and were given a climb radial exactly reciprocal to the Instrument runway! Had to explain a few times on the R/T before the controller agreed to change the sector of ops. The controller’s situational awareness appeared pretty limited and was saturated with just 2-3 arrivals and departures (evident from the somewhat disjointed R/T calls and erratic controlling). There were other occasions during my interactions as Chief of Operations of an IAF base in the northeast – the operating IAF squadrons found some controllers were downright thick-headed, stubborn and impractical. However, on the plus side there were a few chaps who were willing, enthusiastic and proved themselves quite capable of handling fighter aircraft during their periodic deployment at the airfield – not a mean feat that especially as we had the older Type-69 Mig-21’s with terrifying approach speeds and steep approach angles! Personally, I would put it down to poor levels of training, motivation and lack of leadership.

On the other hand, you both seem to be quite terribly sure of yourselves, are'nt you, ManaAdaSystem & White Knight ?? Well, I have been witness to the almost comical sight of the rolling nose-wheel of an ATR overtaking the aircraft after it had broken away post a PIO induced heavy landing at HAL airport, Bangalore.
And YES – the pilot was an ‘expat’.Check out the civil aviation accidents in India in past few years – unfortunately most of them involve expats.

However, the main point about aircrash investigations is objectivity and finding the exact reasons for the accident. So let’s just step back a bit from our pre-conceived ideas and prejudices and wait for the exact reasons to emerge shall we? Anything else and we won’t be the professionals that we claim to be.

[White Knight]

Well, I have been witness to the almost comical sight of the rolling nose-wheel of an ATR overtaking the aircraft after it had broken away post a PIO induced heavy landing at HAL airport, Bangalore.

Wow RigidRotor - gotta screw up an ATR landing bad to do that I always thought it was a pleasurable and easy aeroplane to fly Both 42 and 72..

[protectthehornet]

If hand flying from TOD to touchdown is Cowboy stuff, then call me TEX and hand me my spurs.

As far as busy airports, I can't think of too many busier than New York, Chicago, Washington DC, Atlanta, and Boston.

That's my home turf.

[Chuck Ellsworth]

You take the pilot flying and pilot not flying concept as license to actually fly the thing do you Protectthehornet?

[100BMEP]

Hand Flying

You take the pilot flying and pilot not flying concept as license to actually fly the thing do you Protectthehornet?

Chuck...I agree with you!
I too flew the DC-4's, DC-6's, and Connies. As I recall that was before Auto Land was invented! And yes I too became a "Child of the Magneta Line" in our current generation aircraft. Guess what? One can hand fly those as well!
Sadly I fear needed skills are never being developed so that one can pull them out of the 'back pocket' if (and when) needed.