The pilot of Mumbai-bound Kingfisher Airlines flight IT 304 that narrowly escaped a major mishap on Tuesday morning seems to have missed the warning sign atop the hill that the flight crossed just before losing altitude. The flight on Tuesday descended to 600 feet above ground level near a Thane creek. Air Traffic Control (ATC) officials said that there is an Instrument Landing System (ILS) beacon atop the hill. The flight should have been at least 2,000 feet above ground when it was above the Thane creek. An ATC official also said that on this very hill,which is known as the out-marker hill because of the ILS beacon that marks a flights approach path,a non-scheduled carrier (VT EQM) had crashed 18 years ago. A visual warning at the out-marker hill reads that the flights height should be at least 3,000 feet above sea level, said an ATC official. A senior official from Kingfisher told Newsline on condition of anonymity that at the time IT 304 was above the out-marker hill and lost altitude over the Thane creek,the controls of the flight were in the hands of the co-pilot and not the captain. However,on losing altitude,the captain immediately took control and simultaneously the Flight Movement Guidance System (FMGS) of the aircraft failed. There was a malfunction in the FMGS and the pilot was correcting that and that is why some altitude was lost, said the official. According to the official,the matter has been blown out of proportion. He could have taken go-arounds at 600 feet so there was nothing alarming about it, he added while admitting that the fall in the flights altitude should not have happened. The Kingfisher flight was scheduled to land at the Mumbai airport on Tuesday at 10:30 am. An official said that the flight was just minutes away from the north end of runway 09/27 when the controller noticed the low altitude it was flying at and immediately asked the pilot to gain height. Accordingly the pilot pulled up the flight and opted for a go-around over the airport. The flight landed at the airport at 11:02 am. There were 150 passengers on board the flight. The Mumbai airport has seven approaches for landing. There are hills at most of the approach paths. This makes a flights descent steep at 3.3 degrees when compared to other airports where the average glide slope is roughly three degrees. The 09 end and 14 end of the airports runways 09/27 and 14/32 face the sea however all other approaches have hills, said an ATC official. An ATC official also added that a low altitude of upto 500 feet is acceptable if the pilot faces any technical issues. We could do with upto 500 feet as the flight was above a water body, said the official. A lot depends on what went wrong in the cockpit and what technical issues he faced, said the official. During preliminary enquiry the pilot of the flight told Air Safety branch officials of the DGCA that the flights FMGS had failed because of which the pilot failed to detect its altitude,an airport official added. Kingfisher Airlines Flight Safety Department received a message from the regional office of DGCA on Wednesday stating that flight had been detected at a lower altitude than normal in Mumbai. In keeping with Kingfisher Airlines philosophy of placing guest safety and comfort above everything else,the cockpit crew have been taken off active flight duty and de-rostered pending further investigations. We will abide by any directions that DGCA may give in this regard, the airline said in a statement.
