IndiGo aircraft tail strike incident raises safety concerns as pilots continued flight. File | Photo Credit: Reuters In a major safety breach, a Bengaluru-bound IndiGo aircraft scraped the runway while taking off from Delhi, yet continued to fly to its destination instead of conducting an emergency landing.The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has off-rostered the pilots as well as the cabin crew and is investigating the tail strike that occurred on September 9, involving the IndiGo flight 6E6054, which took off from Delhi at 3.50 p.m. and arrived in Bengaluru at 6.30 p.m.The aircraft is an Airbus A321 Neo and carries the registration mark VT-IBI. It has since been grounded at the Bengaluru airport where it is undergoing repairs.“The digital flight data recorder has been sent to the Original Equipment Manufacturer for a technical analyses, which is awaited,” a senior DGCA official said.Inspection reveals tail strikeThe incident came to light only after the aircraft landed in Bengaluru, and an aircraft maintenance engineer saw scrapes under the aircraft fuselage during an inspection ahead of the next flight, according to multiple sources in the airline industry.The airline confirmed the tail strike. “On 9th September 2024, an IndiGo A321 was grounded in Bangalore due to a tail strike,” it said in a statement without mentioning that the incident occurred in Delhi despite a specific query.The incident has raised many questions. Several pilots The Hindu spoke to wondered how the pilots could continue flying the aircraft after the tail strike instead of carrying out an emergency landing, which is the mandatory procedure in such cases. Such an impact could possibly result in cabin de-pressurisation, or may even damage the tail cone impacting aerodynamic functions as well as the sensitive equipment inside the aircraft such as hydraulics and flight controls. It may even lead to increased fuel burn.No indicatorPilots explained that there is no instrument in the cockpit of an Airbus A320 or 321 to indicate that a tail strike has occurred. They add that sometimes a minor scrape can go unnoticed, especially in the longer A321s where there is an increased distance between the pilots in the cockpit and the rear section of the aircraft, and the impact may not be significant enough to be felt at the front. However, they point out that the cabin crew in the aft or rear section of the aircraft should have been able to relay the information to the pilots as they are trained to detect and respond to loud thuds and scraping noise.In July last year, the DGCA imposed a penalty of ₹20 lakh on IndiGo after at least four incidents of tail strikes came to light in a span of six months, and the regulator found systemic deficiencies in operations, training and engineering procedures following an inquiry. Published – September 17, 2024 10:50 pm IST