Mumbai: The German Air Force on Thursday scrambled two fighter jets to intercept a Jet Airways aircraft that had lost communication with the local Air Traffic Control (ATC) while on its way to London from Mumbai.
The intercept and the several minutes scrambling by the Eurofighter Typhoon jets of the Jet Airways Boeing 777-300 ER aircraft was filmed by the cockpit crew of another aircraft flying in the vicinity and video has since gone viral on the Internet.
The video, viewed by thousands across the globe, shows the two fighter jets and the commercial plane leaving behind a trail of white smoke in the sky.
What caused the communication snap is still not known, but the scrambling was suspended and the fighter jets were disengaged once contact was restored by the Jet Airways pilots.
Confirming the incident a Jet Airways spokesperson said, “ Contact between Jet Airways flight 9W 118, from Mumbai to London Heathrow, of February 16, 2017, and the local ATC, was briefly lost while flying over German airspace.”
“Communication,” the spokesperson added, “was safely restored within a few minutes. As a precaution, the German Air Force deployed its aircraft to ensure the safety of the flight and its guests.”
The aircraft with 330 passengers and 15 crew members continued the flight and landed at Heathrow without any incident.
Blog post
In a his blog, ‘Live From a Lounge’ Ajay Awtaney posted that the Jet Airways aircraft lost communication over the airspace near Cologne leading to the scrambling of the fighter jets.
“It is usual protocol to scramble jets to check in on the cockpit in case someone stops responding to the radio, to be able to visually communicate with the pilots and in case something is wrong in the plane and take further steps according to instructions from the ground,” he writes.
According to him a British Airways plane was trailing this flight and the pilot managed to capture the footage on his mobile camera.
“(In the video) The pilots on the British Airways plane are chatting in a very calm manner as they see this unfold in front of them and that itself indicates that this is not an out of ordinary situation,” Mr Awtaney writes in his blog post.
Pilots de-rostered
But a retired pilot described this incident as a security alert. “It was mandatory for the pilots to stay in touch. The Germans seems to have wanted to ascertain the identity of this aircraft as it did not communicate.”
“It seems the pilots had either gone for a snooze or there could have been a mechanical error,” he added.
Meanwhile, Jet Airways, as part of the standard process, has de-rostered the pilots pending investigation so that they are available to meet the concerned authorities.
Jet Airways said it has reported the matter to the concerned authorities including the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA).
regulator, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA).
