Mumbai: Federation of Indian Pilots (FIP) President Captain C.S. Randhawa on Thursday said that the flydubai flight FZ1073, in which Indian pilot Captain Smit Machchhar was attacked by his co-pilot, would have crashed in the absence of a third pilot who had safely landed the aircraft.
Speaking to IANS, Randhawa said that he has never come across such kind of bloodshed in the cockpit in 50 years of his aviation career.
“So, I do not know what the investigation will reveal when officials take the statements of the crew members, the passengers, and the third pilot. This will be further substantiated by the cockpit voice recorder. It is a very important piece of evidence to establish when this whole thing started,” he said.
“The second one is the digital flight recorder. That will give a lot of parameters…it will tell you what the height of the aircraft was, when it started descending, what the trail of descent was, whose action was it initially? Similarly, the CBR will have picked up from the boom mic regarding which pilot is talking? Whether mic one or mic two is being used? And the overhead mic would have picked up what the passengers spoke while they were present inside the cockpit,” he added.
The FIP President stressed that such information is going to be extremely vital to come to a clear judgment of what had gone wrong in the aircraft.
“There are also theories about terrorism…that it is a deliberate attempt. I think it is premature to say that there was an act of terror, because that has to be established. And if that is the case, it becomes extremely serious because then investigators will have to search the co-pilot’s link with any organisation or what his intention was,” he said.
Randhawa further said that if it was a suicide attempt, “the pilot did an excellent job by overpowering the attacker; also, the person who safely landed the aircraft deserves praise; a few more seconds and the plane could have crashed”.
“If a third pilot was not present, the aircraft would have crashed,” he underlined.
According to Randhawa, the altercation between the pilots must have been brewing up for some time. “Any topic begins with an argument, then it gets physical; at the third stage the person resorts to using a weapon,” he said.
Mentioning how the incident could have been a major tragedy, he said: “During the brawl in the cockpit. One of the pilots might have unstrapped himself, and if one of them had hit his leg on the control column, the autopilot mode would have dropped, and the aeroplane would have steeply descended.”
About what could have been the possible reasons behind the incident, Randhawa said: “One could be CRM failure. Second is if it is a case of terrorism, what are the links of this pilot with any organisation.”
He emphasised that it is premature to jump to any conclusion without the completion of the inquiry.
On steps that need to be taken for aviation safety, Randhawa said: “Psychometric tests of pilots need to be carried out on a regular basis to know about their mental condition, whether they are under some kind of stress or not.”
Stating that the incident is a big eye-opener for the world, he said: “Psychometric tests for pilots should be introduced in the Indian aviation sector as well.”
(IANS)
