A ten-member team of officials from Gulf Air and Bahrain Civil Aviation Affairs left Manama to join the initial investigations, in Kochi, after the Gulf Air plain had a narrow escape on Monday, as it skidded off the runway and came to a halt in a muddy area some 30 meters away damaging its nose wheel.
“Gulf Air is coordinating with relevant authorities in investigating the cause of the incident. At this point, we cannot confirm the extent of the damage to the aircraft. Further investigations are ongoing,” the airline in an official statement said.
Seven of the passengers have sustained injuries, one of them admitted to hospital with fractures, as they jumped to safety out of the plane through the emergency exits of the Airbus 320 aircraft amid confusion. Some of them lost their passports and other documents in the marshy land. The passengers included an infant.
Officials at the Cochin International Airport Limited (CIAL) said bad weather could be the reason for the mishap. The plane stopped before hitting a wall averting a major tragedy, reports said. Most of the passengers were from Saudi Arabia and the neighboring tiny emirate of Bahrain.
A Saudi Arabian Airline flight (SV 778, bound for Jeddah via Riyadh) and 11 domestic flights were canceled following the accident while several flights were delayed or diverted to nearby airports of Thiruvananthapuram, Kozhikode in Kerala and Bangalore in nearby Karnataka state.
Kochi has a normal runway with a length of 3,400 meters, which is believed to have helped in averting a tragedy. There was a heavy rush of vacationing workers ahead of the festival season of Eid Al-Fitr and Onam, the southernmost state's harvest festival.
West Asia is home to some two million guest workers from Kerala and they mainly depend on the three intentional airports in the state as well as Mangalore in the neighboring Karnataka state.
Courtesy : arabnews.com
The accident occurred at 3.55 am Indian time and the runway was immediately closed. It became partially operational by the afternoon after a Disabled Aircraft Retrieval Kit arrived from Mumbai. CIAL runs India's first corporate airport funded mainly by its Diaspora.
The Director General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has ordered an inquiry into the incident. An inquiry team from Chennai has reached the airport and they are looking into it. They will inspect if there's any breach of protocol while landing and if it could have been averted. The airport was immediately closed for traffic.
The CIAL airport authorities were hopeful that the services at the airport would be normalized by midnight. There was no damage to the runway though there was a heavy rain since last night which continued when the plane was landing.
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