The ill-fated Air India Express plane, a Boeing-737, which was repatriating Indians stranded in Dubai due to the coronavirus pandemic, met a tragic accident on the evening of August 7, 2020, when it overshot the runway of the Calicut International Airport in heavy rain near Kozhikode, Kerala. The aircraft fell into a valley and broke in half, killing 18 people in the country’s worst aviation accident in a decade.
Investigators began examining the black box of the Air India Express plane on August 9, 2020. As per the head of India’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), the country would open the recovered transcripts to international investigators, as well as to manufacturer Boeing, in order to conduct a thorough and unbiased probe to determine the cause of the crash.
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The 2,700 metre-long runway at the airport is known as a ‘table-top’, an aviation term for runways with steep drops at one or both ends. Table-top runways leave little room for error should a pilot overshoot the runway, either through human error or a technical snag.
According to reports, the pilot made an aborted landing attempt into a headwind and then made a second approach with a tailwind, landing 1,000 metres down the runway, unfortunately leaving less room to bring the aircraft to a halt.
An aircraft typically lands and departs in a headwind as a tailwind increases the plane’s speed. However, owing to the inclement weather, the runway surface was wet, and the pilot made an unusual attempt at landing with a tailwind, which is usually used for takeoffs.
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