False hijack alarm on Kingfisher flight

Pilots of a Mumbai-bound Kingfisher flight from Hong Kong accidentally set off a hijack alarm while approaching the Mumbai airport on Tuesday evening. Sources said the aircraft was 10 miles from the airport when the alarm went off and the reason was a failure of the aircrafts radiotelephony system.

However,according to a spokesperson for Kingfisher Airlines,the false alarm went off after the aircraft had landed at the airport. Also the cockpit crew of Kingfishers flight IT 072 later clarified to Air Traffic Control (ATC) that the hijack alarm was false,triggered accidentally while switching frequencies for communication with ATC.

All aircraft have a special Squawk code frequency that is equivalent to a ships SOS code at 121.5 MHz. According to a Kingfisher official,the hijack alarm code was triggered because its frequency is very close between two other frequencies in use.