An Indigo airline recently had a narrow escape after it got caught in a violent hailstorm. Though the crew managed a very difficult landing without any injuries to the passengers, it brought back chilling memories of the Air France Flight that went down in 2009 due to a storm that it could not weather.
On May 21, an Indigo A321 Neo aircraft en route from Delhi to Srinagar with 227 passengers onboard encountered an unexpected hailstorm and severe turbulence near the city of Pathankot, which is located close to the border with Pakistan.
Faced with a grave emergency, the crew asked permission to divert to Pakistan, which was denied by the Pakistani Air Traffic Control (ATC). At the same time, the Indian Air Force (IAF) also denied a request to divert towards the international border due to sustained tensions between the two countries.
An official release published by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) in the aftermath of the incident stated: “As per the crew statement, they requested Northern control (IAF) for deviation towards left (International Border) due to weather on the route, however, it was not approved. Later crew contacted Lahore to enter their airspace to avoid the weather, but the same was refused too.”
Both India and Pakistan had closed their airspaces to one another’s flights in the wake of recent tensions and resulting border clashes. Pakistan’s airspace closure for Indian aircraft was supposed to end on May 23, but has now been extended till June 24, 2025.
In the aftermath of the incident, some unidentified IAF sources told the media that the IAF’s Northern Area Control Centre (NACC) is not authorized to allow Indian aircraft to enter international airspace since only Delhi Air Traffic Control has this power.
Nonetheless, the crew demonstrated exceptional resilience and skill in the face of this adversity, which could have ended in a catastrophic crash.
As per the press release, “Crew initially attempted to return, but as they were close to the thunderstorm cloud, they decided to penetrate the weather. Subsequently, they encountered a hailstorm and severe turbulence. The crew chose to continue on the same heading to exit the weather by the shortest route towards Srinagar.”
As its flight control systems failed while trapped in the storm, the aircraft plummeted at a rate of 8,500 feet per minute—more than four times the normal descent rate. The pilots received simultaneous warnings of stall, a condition in which an aircraft begins to lose altitude, and overspeed conditions as they struggled to regain control.
Showing exceptional skill, the pilots flew the aircraft manually till they could exit the hailstorm. “After carrying out all checklist actions (ECAM actions), the crew declared PAN PAN to Srinagar ATC and requested RADAR vectors and made a safe landing with Auto Thrust operating normally,” as per the statement. PAN PAN is a high level of emergency, only a level short of MAYDAY.
The plane eventually landed safely at Srinagar Airport, assisted by the IAF, which provided control vectors and groundspeed readouts.
No passengers on board were injured. However, an inspection of the flight revealed that the nose radome had been damaged. The images went viral on social media, with aviation analysts heaping praise on the crew and calling them heroes for conducting a near-impossible landing.
While modern weather radar systems on airliners typically help pilots avoid severe weather, some unexpected or rapidly developing storms can still lead to encounters with hail, as was the case with the Indigo flight. These storms can cause significant damage to critical components of the aircraft, such as the nose cone, windscreen, engines, or leading edges of wings. This is why diversion and emergency landing are sought.
Last year, an Austrian Airlines Airbus A320 en route from Palma de Mallorca, Spain, to Vienna, Austria, encountered a hailstorm during flight, causing significant damage to the nose and windscreen. The nose of the aircraft partially disintegrated. The aircraft eventually landed safely in Vienna due to effective pilot response, with no reported injuries.
Before that, in 2019, a China Southern Airlines Airbus A380 flying from Guangzhou to Beijing suffered damage while passing through a hailstorm. While the aircraft landed safely, and no injuries were reported, the hail violently hit the aircraft, causing visible damage to the airframe.
Unlike these incidents, the Indigo flight found itself in a much dire situation as it was not allowed to change its course due to the India-Pakistan tensions.
This incident brings back memories of the Air France Flight 447, which could not escape its fate and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in June 2009 after a series of errors in the cockpit during a storm-induced emergency.
The Catastrophic Crash Of Air France 447
Air France Flight 447 was a scheduled international passenger flight of Airbus A330-203 that traveled to Paris, France, from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on June 1, 2009.
A few hours after taking off, the flight entered the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), a region near the equator known for intense thunderstorms and turbulence, and vanished from the radars without a mayday signal.
It went down into the Atlantic Ocean with 216 passengers of 33 different nationalities, along with 12 crew members, all of whom were killed in the tragic accident.
The aircraft’s debris was discovered in the ocean a few days later. However, the search for recovering the “black box” flight recorders took almost two years. In fact, the historic French search operation lasted for 22 months and combed 17,000 square kilometers of the ocean floor at depths of up to 4,000 meters.
It was later found that the aircraft’s airspeed sensors were rendered inoperable by ice crystals found at high altitudes during the storm that whipped the aircraft, preventing it from detecting speed and altitude. The pitot tubes froze due to supercooled water droplets in the storm, leading to unreliable airspeed data.
The flight captain had left the cockpit for a rest break, leaving the two first officers in control when the aircraft ran into this storm. The aircraft was on autopilot, cruising at 35,000 feet. However, the ice crystals caused the autonomic pilot feature to fail.
Following this, a series of error chains occurred that finally ended in a crash.
First, the aircraft went into a stall after the automatic pilot stopped functioning. However, the crew failed to recognize the stall and applied incorrect inputs. One of the co-pilots gave persistent nose-up input, which kept the aircraft in a stalled condition, contrary to standard stall recovery procedures that call for pushing the nose down to regain airspeed.
As per reports, the Airbus A330’s fly-by-wire system, operating in alternate law, did not prevent the stall, and the non-linked sidesticks meant the pilots’ inputs were not visible to each other. This caused massive confusion among the co-pilots.
Since the pilots mishandled the loss of instrumentation and subsequently were unable to understand the extent of the issues they had created, they lost control of the aircraft.
Factors like poor communication and lack of coordination between the pilots led to the failure to diagnose the situation. While the captain returned to the cockpit during the crisis, but could not intervene effectively in time.
In one of the flight recordings obtained later, a co-pilot was heard saying, ”We’ve lost our speeds,” before a sequence of alert messages appeared on the cockpit screens and other indications inadvertently started to indicate a loss of altitude. Another pilot said, “I have no idea what’s going on.”
The aircraft subsequently plunged into the sea. Following this tragic crash, the airline Air France and the aircraft maker Airbus were tried on charges of involuntary manslaughter.
This crash changed aviation forever by highlighting the vulnerabilities of instrumentation, high-altitude flying, and inadequacies in pilot training. It led to changes in safety regulations, enhanced pilot training, and the introduction of airspeed sensors.
The crash underscored the dangers of over-reliance on automation, as the pilots struggled to manage the aircraft manually after the autopilot disconnected.
It prompted a reevaluation of pilot training for fly-by-wire aircraft, emphasizing manual flying skills. As safety measures improved, this contributed to the global commercial aviation fatality rate dropping below 0.1 per million passengers by 2019.
More than a decade later, the importance of manual flying still reigns supreme, as demonstrated by the latest Indigo incident.
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