Jet Airways flight with 134 passengers averts mid-air collision

Jet Airways flight with 134 passengers averts mid-air collision
Aircraft incident
Guwahati, July 21 (IANS) A Jet Airways flight with 134 passengers on board narrowly averted a mid-air collision Thursday, triggering panic aboard, passengers said.


Jet Airways Flight No 9W 2280 from New Delhi to Guwahati was probably flying over Patna when it abruptly lost control, leading to chaos inside.

'First the flight abruptly turned right and then began to plummet. We thought it would crash. There was chaos and people were screaming inside,' Caushik Bezboruah, chief executive officer of News Live, a satellite TV channel from Guwahati, told IANS.

'I heard people crying, some praying on top of their voices. It was a chaotic situation for close to a minute before the pilot took control,' added Bhaskar Sharma, director of News Live.

Both Bezboruah and Sharma were seated in the emergency exit row of the plane.

Soon after, the pilot announced that another plane was approaching from the opposite direction and was inside the 'safe zone'.

'The pilot said the flight's computer system automatically navigated the plane and moved away from the path of the approaching flight to avoid a mid-air collision,' Bezboruah said.

The incident took place around 11.35 a.m. The Jet Airways flight landed safely in Guwahati around 1 p.m.

'No one was injured but I saw a woman with an infant frantically trying to reach her seat from the washroom when this incident took place. She didn't manage to reach her seat and instead sat on the aisle,' Sharma said.

Among those aboard the plane included Assam Congress president Bhubaneswar Kalita and Congress MP Rani Narah. 'God is great. We had a near brush with death,' said Narah.

Jet authorities in Guwahati refused to comment on the incident saying a formal statement, if any, would be made from their head office in Mumbai.

MAINTENANCE ERRORS
It's fairly well-known that most accidents are human error related, at least in part. And in aviation, because pilots are always first to arrive at the scene of an accident, it is generally a maxim that to some degree, pilot error is normally involved - to some degree. It may not necessarily be the primary cause but it could be that a pilot team failed to cope with the circumstances that they were suddenly handed. On the other hand, one is not to know whether (or to what degree) their mount let them down. We rarely hear much about the success stories when a pilot does manage to accommodate a systems or hardware failure and retrieve the situation. And then of course there are the circumstances where a scenario is complicated by weather, fuel shortages, pilot fatigue, terrorism, passenger rage or inexperience.

But what about Maintenance Error? Since the end of the Cold War the pool of Air Force trained technicians around the World has dried up and expertise is becoming a little harder to come by. To what degree will Maintenance Error become a more significant factor in the future? And when it is a materiel failure such as faulty (or deficient) wiring, will it ever be apparent? Is that designated maint error or designer error? Or is there (should there be?) another category of error? Perhaps we could call it regulatory error. 

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