Collision

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22 highlights

• He had to ensure that the planes stayed 1,000 feet apart, as per International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) standards. In front of him was the old-fashioned primary radar where the “targets”— moving blips on the screen—gave him information on flight direction but, critically, not on altitude. For that, he would have to rely on the pilot’s word. Major Indian airports were in the process of installing secondary surveillance radar, indicating flight altitude and speed. But the technology was not yet at Dutta’s disposal.

• In the 1990s, the English-speaking skills of pilots from the erstwhile Soviet Union were notably uneven. Maddeningly for the rest of the world, the former Soviet states also followed the metric system, mapping distances in metres and kilometres while most countries worked with feet and nautical miles. This complicated communications and opened up room for error so it was essential for air traffic controllers to speak slowly and enunciate clearly.

• And it happened when a Kazakh crew misunderstood the instructions of the ATC at Delhi airport, bringing its plane directly in the line of a Saudi Arabian Airlines Boeing 747, in the worst mid-air collision in history.

• That was it. Both flights fell silent. The moving dots on Dutta’s screen fused. And then vanished.

• Mistaking it for an earthquake, residents streamed out of their homes, only to find over 500 tonnes of material pouring out from the sky—what an India Today story vividly described as “the equivalent of 600 Maruti cars”.

• At one point, the grandson of a prominent politician waltzed in,[4] chaperoned by a group of sidekicks and handlers. He had no reason to be there but quickly became the centre of attention. When asked what he was doing there, he smarmily replied, “Plane curiosity.”

• Chopra sensed something puzzling, even counter-intuitive. The frontal structure of the Kazakh flight was mostly intact, which indicated that this hadn’t been a head-on collision. If the Kazakh plane was supposed to have been higher (15,000 feet), why did a primary assessment suggest that it had hit the Saudi plane from below?

• After 15 days in the morgue, the unclaimed bodies were divided in proportion to the Hindus and Muslims on board according to the passenger manifest, a compromise between community leaders following an initial dispute.

• At a press conference a day after the crash, civil aviation secretary Yogesh Chandra triumphantly waved a copy of the conversation records. “From this it is clear, Kazakh Airways knew it was to be at 150 [15,000 feet],” he told journalists, ”… that both the planes were aware of each other’s approach, especially the Kazakh Airlines…”

• Aeroflot, national carrier of the erstwhile Soviet Union, had been plagued with issues stemming from old planes, poor maintenance and corruption.[10] But the Kazakhs defended their dead countrymen and blamed Indian air traffic control. Saudi officials fumed about Indian media coverage of the crash.

• O ne theory of accidents is what experts call the Swiss Cheese model. A slab of Swiss cheese has several holes, randomly and unevenly distributed over its surface. If several slabs are stacked together, it would be impossible for something to slip through unless all the holes happen to line up.

• Aviation professionals will tell you that plane crashes never happen for a single reason. There may be an identifiable primary factor, but it’s usually a chain of events, an array of circumstances neatly piling up.

• Both concluded that the collision had happened close to 14,000 feet,[12] a finding that all parties accepted before the court. This raised the next logical question: Why did the Kazakh aircraft leave its assigned height and descend to 14,000 feet?

• The report concluded it was a failure of the Kazakh crew. They had not only misunderstood the instructions, but also failed to coordinate and cross-check with each other. Cherepanov’s inept “crew resource management”, and “poor airmanship” came in for specific censure.

• The end, when it came, was swift. But in those final moments, both cockpits realised what was happening.[17] The Kazakhs were frantically trying to salvage the situation. In the Boeing, the Islamic prayer before death was chanted: “Astaghfir Allah, Asyhadu Unlaelaha Illallah.” God grant forgiveness, I witness no other God.

• Before Charkhi Dadri, controllers had to manage several movements per hour, often within the same air corridor, a rich arena for possible errors.

• “If your report is spattered with blood, implementation becomes easy,” said AK Chopra, formerly of the DGCA. “We had been fighting for a secondary radar and separate corridors at the Delhi airport for months. We got them immediately after the accident.”

• In 1993, Chinese pilots crashed into the ground partly because they could not comprehend why the ground warning system was telling them to “pull up”

• In 1997, a Korean co-pilot, wary of upsetting the senior captain, allegedly used indirect language instead of spelling out the situation. The plane collided into a hill and 223 people died.

• India claimed that ATC instructions were often disregarded or misinterpreted, resulting in situations where flight levels were mixed up, wrong run-ways were approached and wrong radials steered. The assembly accepted India’s working paper proposal to include language proficiency standards as part of licensing, and set in motion a long process to lay down the specifics.

• Should English be the only language for aviation? This was discussed too, and eventually, the ICAO decided the English language proficiency requirements would apply only to international operations.

• Natasha Badhwar also covered the Uphaar Cinema fire in 1997 and the Kandahar hijacking in 1999. The coverage and national response to those tragedies had a different texture. Perhaps this was because they centred on identifiable people.