Flight operations at Mumbai airport were severely affected for 21 hours after a inbound Lufthansa flight from Munich suffered four tyre bursts while landing late on Friday night and could not be moved, blocking the main runway.
All 163 passengers and crew on board the Airbus A330 flight were deplaned using stairs. There were no injuries, the airline said in a statement.
As the wide-bodied aircraft remained stranded on the runway till late in the evening, Mumbai airport had to shift operations to the secondary runway, leading to many international flights being cancelled and delays in arrivals of several more.
The aircraft was finally towed away from the main runway around 8 pm on Saturday and flight operations were expected to be normalised by midnight. The main runway was available for regular operations from 9 pm after authorities inspected it.
Soon after the incident occurred at 10.50 pm on Friday, four international airlines including Singapore Airlines, United Airlines and Air India had to cancel their flights as the main runway was unavailable. Singapore Airlines’ A380 bound for Singapore was stranded at the airport through Saturday and left after a delay of over 22 hours. An international cargo aircraft was diverted to Hyderabad airport, officials familiar with the development said.
“Both domestic and international flights were running late. It took a long time to get the stranded aircraft to move from the runway,” an airport official said.
Air India engineers were working to replace the tyres as the national carrier is the designated entity to attend to such accidents in any airport in India. An AI official said they did their best to move the aircraft at the earliest possible off Runway 27, which is the main runway.
In a statement issued on Saturday, Lufthansa said: “On May 13 at 10.50 pm local time, four tyres of the aircraft of flight LH764 from Munich to Mumbai had been damaged. The plane could not be moved from runway 27 (main runway).” Flight LH765 scheduled for May14 had to be cancelled and the airline is trying to rebook at least 223 passengers on other flights, the statement said.
The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has initiated an inquiry into the incident. A DGCA official said, “We are looking into the matter and investigations are on. Preliminary inquiry indicates that there could have been some foreign object on the runway that caused the tyre bursts, or there was some mechanical failure that led to the incident.”
The Lufthansa statement said, “DCGA is in charge of investigating the incident and we have to wait for the outcome. We certainly won’t join into speculation but cooperate very closely with the local authorities.”
It took a long time to move the aircraft off the runway as Air India engineers replaced the tyres on the runway itself to avoid any damage to the runway as well as the aircraft, officials said.
However, experts said the damage to the tyres could have been caused either by manual braking or landing at a speed higher than the prescribed limit. “It can’t be a tyre issue. It is next to impossible that all four rear tyres of the aircraft get damaged at the same time. In this case, prima facie , it appears to be either a snag in the braking system or the pilot landing at an unusually high speed,” a former DGCA official said while ruling out any possibility of the runway surface being responsible.
There haven’t been any instances of such an accident in the country in recent memory though aviation industry officials said they are not rare. The delay in flight operations are because Mumbai airport, despite being the second-busiest airport in the country, has only one main runway while all other major airports have two.
With PTI inputs
