Nose Wheel Mishap: DGCA Suspends Maintenance Engineer

NEW DELHI: A day after a Go Air flight from Mumbai to Delhi made a miraculous landing at Delhi's IGI airport after losing a nose wheel during take-off, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) suspended a lady assistant maintenance engineer at Mumbai who had carried out work on the nose wheel before the aircraft left for Delhi.

According to sources, the engineer has one year of experience and a probe is still on to ascertain whether the specified process of supervision and certification of work done on the aircraft was followed or not. Go Air officials maintained silence on the issue and were not available for comments.

Said DGCA chief Kanu Gohain: "The AMC was suspended on the basis of a report on the nose wheel. The investigations are still on but it has been ascertained prima facie that perfunctory work was carried out on the nose wheel.''

A passenger had told Times City on Thursday, after the flight had landed in Delhi, that they had seen people working on the aircraft just before it took off. "We saw some people work at the nose wheel so it is quite possible that they were responsible for the incident,'' said A P Ghogre, a passenger.

Meanwhile, after the emergency landing, the main runway had been blocked by the Go Air aircraft and the secondary runway had been put to use for both landings and take-offs. Despite having three runways now, the airport saw some congestion and several flights got delayed by 30-45 minutes. Even though the official operational hours for the new runway are from 6 am to 6 pm, nobody was able to explain why the secondary runway was in use as early as 4.45 pm on Thursday.

While Delhi International Airport (P) Ltd (DIAL) officials claimed that they did not have idea on the operational aspect of the new runway. Senior government officials said that while the air traffic control was ready on its part to have the runway operational for 24 hours, DIAL had written to them, saying the operational hours would be restricted due to technical reasons.

A day after the new runway had become operational, its lights had failed, casting a shadow of doubt on its reliability. After that DIAL had restricted the use of the runway, making it operational only till early afternoon. Though its use was extended for another few hours but even now, it is not used at night.