IndiGo’s simultaneous take off case at Bengaluru airport, ATCO suspended

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The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) suspended one air traffic controller’s (ATCO) licence for a period of three months on May 30. The decision came after two flights were allowed to take off simultaneously from two runways of Bengaluru airport on January 7 and a serious collision was averted due to the intervention of the approach radar controller.

Reportedly, both the flights had hundreds of passengers on board. The incident took place on Januray 7, after the two IndiGo flights 6E 455 (from Bengaluru to Kolkata) and 6E 246 (from Bengaluru to Bhubaneswar) took off simultaneously from north and south Runway of the airport and got involved in a case of ‘breach of separation.

According to the statement given by the Aviation regulator, “South tower controller gave departure to 6E 455 in coordination with Approach Radar controller and at the same time, North tower controller gave departure to 6E 246 without prior coordination. As both aircraft after departure were on converging heading i.e. moving towards each other”.

It is further mentioned that the approach radar controller gave diverging heading order in order to separate both the aircrafts. At the closest point of collision, the vertical separation was 100 ft and the vertical separation between both the planes was 0.9 NM.

The DGCA said, “ATCO licence of north tower controller who was also the watch supervisory officer (WSO) of the shift, was suspended for a period of three months as he failed to comply with the coordination procedures during change of runway operations from segregated mode to single mode of operations.”

Shift supervisor of the air traffic control has been issued a formal warning “for not monitoring the activities of ATC Tower and non-reporting of incident”.

The incident has been classified under “serious incident” category and was under investigation by Air Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB).

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