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The past week has been an incident filled “odd” one for Bengaluru International Airport (BIA).
On Monday (day 1 of the week), a Kingfisher Airlines Airbus A320 skidded off runway 27 in rain and high winds and damaged runway lights and its landing gear, forcing the airport to shut down the runway during the peak international flights period for an hour.
On Wednesday (day 3), an Emirates airline decided to repeat the Kingfisher incident. In a torrential tropical thunderstorm with high crosswinds the flight crew decided to land on runway 27. The extremely hard landing caused the airplane to bounce back up in to the air where a 30 knot gust of crosswind caught it and forced it to the left — way left. While the captain was throttling up the engines for a go-around, the plane was headed straight for the ATC tower more than 500 meters to the south of the runway. People at the kerbside of the terminal were shocked to see and hear the plane thunder overhead banking severely right and narrowly missing the tower. After a successful go-around the pilot declared emergency fuel and make a priority landing.
Today morning, Friday (day 5), the radar system at the airport failed, forcing the controllers to resort to manual control. The peak hour naturally produced a huge traffic jam in the skies forcing quite a few flights to divert to Chennai. Its such a tragedy that a perfectly functioning airport, HAL, just a few miles south of BIA, is not used as an alternate airport by the airlines — something I had proposed way back in June 2008.
Lets just hope day 7 goes off without any further incidents.
Incidentally, Kingfisher and its MRO crews must have worked overtime to repair VT-KFT since I caught a picture of it yesterday late at dusk coming in to land on runway 27.
For some more images check out my gallery at Planeppotters.net. In addition to some really classy images, it has one of the most comprehensive airline databases around.
In closing, Airbus A380 MSN017 the fifth for Emirates A6-EDE will be delivered today and will leave Hamburg today at 1900 for Dubai.
