Click to play videoNew Delhi: There was chaos at New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport as two of Air India’s international flights made emergency landings on April 9. Passengers however, escaped unhurt both times.
Air India believes that these were not miracles, but the result of systematic training programme for pilots in handling emergencies.
“Air India focuses a lot on training because safety has always been our primary goal as it is a commercial organisation and we have to take passengers from A to B. But it is never at the cost of safety,” says dy general manager (Training), Harpreet A De Singh.
The reason for Air India to be confident about is its flight-training simulator based in Mumbai that can put a pilot through every imaginable emergency situation.
“The advantage in a simulator is that you can handle any type of emergency that can be encountered in an aircraft without any danger to the crew or even the aeroplane,” says addl general manager (Operations), Capt Vivek Kulkarni.
And even though the simulator has set back Air India by $15 million, the airline is happy that it is already recovering costs.
“A simulator typically costs between $400 to $600 in an hour, whereas if a pilot has to fly an aircraft for example a 7474 aircraft then it would be more than $5, 000 an hour,” says exec director, (Finance), S Venkat.
Air India trains all of its 650 odd pilots on simulators and also conducts flight tests routinely, so even if an emergency arises the pilots feel confident and can land the aircraft without any trouble.
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