IndiGo plane’s underbody gets scraped while landing in Kolkata airport – Times of India

KOLKATA: An international flight operated by IndiGo Airlines did a bounced landing at Kolkata airport on Monday evening, with the aircraft underbelly scraping the tarmac that led to its immediate grounding. Categorised a significant ‘incident’, it triggered an automatic inquiry by the country’s aviation regulator and de-rostering of the cockpit crew till completion of inquiry. The captain and co-pilot will have to undergo retraining before being allowed to fly again.
The underbelly of the Airbus A321neo aircraft showed extensive scrape marks from the tailstrike from the bounced landing at 4.51pm on Monday. Flight 6E 1859 carrying 200 passengers had taken off from Dhaka at 4.42pm local time (4.12pm IST). The damage was reported in post-flight inspection and the aircraft grounded for thorough inspection and repairs. It will need to undergo test flight checks after repairs to get the nod from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation to be re-inducted into commercial operations.

Veteran pilots said the incident may have been caused due to the pilots erring in calculating the rate of descent during touchdown. Adverse environmental conditions, like strong tailwinds, can also cause bounced landing. But such winds were not reported by the meteorological office at the airport on Monday evening.
Airport officials said the aircraft with registration VT-ILR that was inducted into the IndiGo fleet in August 2021 is still grounded for assessment. “Engineers will be flown down for inspection, repairs and servicing, before a test flight is conducted to get an air-worthiness certificate from DGCA. This is undertaken to ensure there was no structural damage to the plane during the incident,” an official said.
Had the tailstrike happened during take-off, the aircraft would have had to immediately turn around and land in Dhaka. “A tailstrike is considered a serious incident that can affect the structural integrity of an aircraft. During take-off, it can be due to the rate at which the nose wheel of the aircraft is lifted towards the sky. It can happen due to miscalculation in speed caused by a combination of factors, like the aircraft weight, and environmental conditions, like temperature, pressure and humidity in the air,” another pilot said.
The airline, in a statement, acknowledged the incident and said it was being investigated in detail.