Ranchi flight lands in Kolkata after ‘fuel SOS’

KOLKATA: The pilot of a Delhi-Ranchi Air-Asia flight with 127 passengers and six crew members on board diverted the aircraft to Kolkata and made a priority landing there on Tuesday. It isn’t clear why he made the diversion call, but experts indicated he feared fuel running out if he had to hover over Ranchi, where he was third in landing sequence.
The pilot of flight I5 545 radioed a fuel SOS after making a single round over Ranchi.He had taken off from Delhi at 2.14pm and was scheduled to reach Ranchi at 4pm.
TOI reached out to the airline but no response arrived till the time of going to print.
Ranchi airport director Vinod Kumar Sharma said asking a plane to make a single round wasn’t unusual. “The weather was good, the visibility perfect. The AirAsia flight was No. 3 in landing sequence. The pilot could have thought that he may not have enough fuel to hold, and diverted to Kolkata to refuel,” said Sharma.
Kolkata airport general manager (air traffic services) Rajender Singh Lahauria confirmed that the flight sought a priority landing in Kolkata after a fuel SOS. A controller cleared other planes from the flight’s path and brought it to land at 4.39pm.
It isn’t clear, however, whether the plane had the mandatory 30 minutes’ fuel left when it touched down but sources indicated the captain had panicked because it was a touch-and-go situation.
Flights travelling from a city to another are required to not only carry fuel to land at the destination, but also enough additional fuel to make it to the nearest airport with at least 30 minutes of flying time still left.
A veteran pilot said it was extremely unusual for a pilot to seek a diversion simply because it is in a landing queue, when there is no weather turbulence or visibility issue. “There are several possibilities that that could have led to low fuel,” he said. “First, the pilot may have miscalculated the fuel requirement. One reason for that could be that the plane’s actual load was more than what was fed into the system to calculate the flight’s fuel requirement. Second, the pilot may have been assigned a low altitude, which led to more fuel burn. Third, he may just have been carrying enough fuel to make it straight to Ranchi, without making any allowance for even a short hold there. The third possibility looks more plausible than the other two,” he said.
A former AirAsia pilot said private carriers operating to Ranchi preferred to carry the bare minimum fuel to meet the regulatory norms and refuel there, as fuel was much cheaper in Ranchi than at other airports. “Unlike Delhi, that has a nearly 25% tax on ATF, the Jharkhand government levies 4% tax. Hence, the practice to travel light to Ranchi and then tank up,” he said.
The AirAsia flight took off from Kolkata at 5.28pm after refuelling and reached Ranchi at 6.32pm.