In a mid-air scare, two Indigo aircraft came within 200 feet of one another while flying over Bengaluru’s airspace on July 10 but a collision was avoided after a timely warning from the Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS).
In a statement, IndiGo said that the two aeroplanes were four miles apart and had a vertical separation of 200 feet, which is when TCAS sounded a warning.
“The TCAS-Resolution Advisory system was triggered on two of our aircraft operating Coimbatore-Hyderabad and Bangalore-Cochin routes respectively on July 10, 2018. Following normal procedure this has been reported to the regulator,” IndiGo said in a statement.
According to the statement, one of the two aircraft was operating on the Coimbatore- Hyderabad route and the other one was flying on the Bengaluru-Cochin route, reported ANI.
Meanwhile, the Bangalore International Airport Limited issued a statement saying, ”An incident involving two A320 aircraft operated by Indigo Airlines occurred in South Indian airspace on 10th July, 2018 - some distance away from Kempegowda International Airport, Bengaluru. The aircraft were routing Coimbatore-Hyderabad and Bangalore-Cochin respectively at an altitude in excess of 27,000ft. Pilots on board both aircraft were alerted to the presence of the other by on-board systems and, subsequently reported the occurrence to the DGCA in accordance with standard operating procedures".
However, this is not the first time that IndiGo aircraft are involved in such an incident.
In May, a mid-air collision involving an IndiGo aircraft operating on the Visakhapatnam- Bengaluru route and an Indian Air Force (IAF) plane was averted over Chennai skies.
A disaster was averted when the Resolution Advisory (RA) in the IndiGo plane went off, warning the pilots. The two planes were allegedly around 300 feet apart from each other when the RA alerted the IndiGo pilots.
In July 2017, a plane of the Border Security Force (BSF) carrying the Home Secretary came within a radius of 500-1000 metres of another IndiGo jet. The TCAS in the IndiGo plane came to the rescue when it alerted the cockpit on time and the course was corrected.
In 2016, two IndiGo jets were 25 seconds away from crashing into each other in the Dhaka airspace. According to reports, the aircraft came too close owing to turbulence which was not detected by the radars. The TCAS alerted the cockpit of one of the aircraft and a collision was avoided.
The TCAS is a system fitted into aircraft to alert the cockpit about the other aircraft nearby and to serve as the last-resort defence mechanism to avert an accident. It alerts the pilots about air traffic within the specified vicinity of the aircraft so that pilots can undertake course-correction if need be.