President Pratibha Patil is scheduled to land again at the Mumbai airport on Saturday, after a scare on her earlier visit when an Air India Airbus 321 commercial aircraft with 150 passengers on board narrowly missed colliding with one of the three helicopters of her convoy.

Four months on, not even a preliminary inquiry report on the near-collision has been submitted by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA).

“A meeting was called today by the general administration department of the state informing us of the President’s visit,” said a senior official.

On February 10, Air India flight IC 866 aborted takeoff at the last moment after an air traffic controller spotted one of the choppers of the presidential entourage on the airport’s flight path and alerted the pilot.

The questions that raised on aviation safety had not been answered before the airport had another collision scare. Two departing aircraft, carrying 239 passengers between them, were about to take off simultaneously from crisscrossing runways before an air traffic controller spotted it and asked one of the pilots to abort takeoff.

“Annexure 13 of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) Aircraft Accident and Incident Investigation states that they are supposed to publish a preliminary report of the incident within two weeks of the incident,” said Captain A Ranganathan, an air safety expert. “In these cases when they have access to all records, they have no excuses.”

Air traffic controllers too are unhappy. “It was only due to human intervention that these incidents were averted at the last minute,” said a senior traffic controller. “Nobody raises these issues though it affects all of us, especially passengers.”

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