Submit near-miss reports to us, says AAI to ATC

Officials from the safety department of Airport Authority of India (AAI)’s west region are concerned about the discontinuation of submission of near-miss incident reports to them.

According to a senior official of this department, the last time an incident of near-miss was reported to them was in 2013 but since then no information has been provided to the department. The department is planning to raise this question in the next meeting of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA). According to the rules of DGCA, that were designed in 2005, every Air Traffic Control (ATC) center has to give reports about every incident that took place on the runway or in air. An official of safety department said, “Near-miss or any incident that occurs on the runway is directly connected with the safety, and being a safety department, reports of such incidents must be submitted to us.”

According to the sources from AAI, in April 2013, an Air India flight landed at the Mumbai Airport, without taking permission from ATC, as there was some miscommunication between the departments. During the time of the incident, the head of the AAI safety department was in Chennai, so by ATC primary report was directly sent to DGCA, but since then, the department has not received any reports.

A senior official from safety department said, “Every two years the DGCA conducts a safety audit, and during the last meeting we came to know that, in fiscal year 2012-13 there were as many as 10 near-miss incidents happened, while in 2013-14 there were total 13 incidents, but we were in the dark. Now, we are again asking for the reports of every incident which took place in Mumbai skies or the runway.”

A top official of the ATC said, “We were asked by the DGCA to submit reports directly to them, and several incidents including the death of a dog on the runway last month and a balloon flying over the runway in May were reported to DGCA.” DGCA western region officer confirmed this and said, “We get reports from ATC regularly and probe is going underway in many cases as well.”