A blinding downpour and perhaps an erroneous marking of the taxi-bay at Kolkata airport nearly triggered a mishap in the wee hours of Sunday. A Lufthansa flight, bound for Frankfurt with 230 passengers on board, took a wrong turn while taxing for takeoff and was stopped in the nick of time.

It was around 1.07 am that flight LH 751 pushed back from parking bay 43 and started taxing towards the primary runway, taking taxiway C. But on reaching taxibay B, the pilot suddenly took a left turn towards the secondary runway instead of heading straight to the take-off point on the primary runway.

The nose wheel of the runway had already entered the wrong taxiway and the rear wheels were just about to roll in when an alert air traffic controller noticed it from the tower. He raised an alarm and the pilot was stopped short of a no-go zone.

“It was raining hard and the secondary runway was under maintenance work. Fortunately, the traffic control official noticed it at the right time, Otherwise there was a high possibility of a disaster,” said an apron control official.

The plane would have run into double trouble: the secondary runway was being repaired and taxiway B is too narrow (used only by ATR aircraft) to handle the 84-ft wheelbase of the Airbus A340-300.

“Had the plane entered the taxiway the rear wheel would have hit the grass and the aircraft could have been grounded,” said an AAI official. As air traffic control alerted the ground support of both the Airports Authority of India and Lufthansa, there was a scramble to rush to the spot with a ‘follow-me’ van, which guides the pilot to make way through the runway area.

For the next 40 minutes, it was a tough yet delicate task for the officials to guide the 250-tonne aircraft to the right track and the flight finally took off at 1.40 am — 35 minutes behind schedule. Although the exact reasons behind the near-mishap is not known yet, airport officials suspect the pilot may not have been able to track the marking of the taxiway due to the incessant rainfall.

“The pilot is very experienced but has flown very rarely to Kolkata. Perhaps, he was not accustomed to the runway zone of this airport,” said a Lufthansa Airlines official. Veteran pilots and air safety officials of other airlines also agree that this may be the reason for the aircraft taking the wrong turn. “Generally, a pilot, who is flying to and from a airport he is not accustomed to, religiously follows the guide maps to taxi down the apron area. Perhaps the marking was not right and the rainfall made visibility difficult,” said a veteran pilot from Kolkata.

source: timesofindia.indiatimes.com