Air India Phuket-Delhi Flight: Captain Sam Thomas on altitude loss and hydraulic failure

New Delhi: Captain Sam Thomas, President, Airline Pilots’ Association of India, on Monday said that while its too far to find out the reason behind the sudden altitude loss of an Air India flight from Phuket to Delhi on August 4. As many as 17 people were injured in the incident.

Speaking to News9 Managing Editor Kartikeya Sharma, Thomas said that he spoke the unprecedented nature of such a failure on an Airbus 320. He observed that the pilot’s quick response helped stabilise the aircraft and averted a major accident.

‘Too far from finding whose fault it was’

“It’s too far from finding out whose fault it was. We have to go step by step to understand as to, firstly, without ascertaining the facts, when you start reporting, it invariably ends up—people end up getting it wrong. And that we’ve been harping on for a long time. However, there is an aspect of, you know, being the first one to crack a story, and that’s exactly what has happened here,” he said.

Thomas added, “It was attributed to turbulence. Now, while that particular route has a lot of turbulence and we have flown that a million times, what people must understand, or passengers must be sensitized to, is that turbulence is an integral part of aviation. You cannot wish away turbulence.
With the global warming that is happening, the weather over India and South Asia particularly is getting a little bit more violent. So therefore, please have your seatbelt fastened irrespective of whether the signs are on or not”.

“As far as this particular flight is concerned, if everybody had waited for the pilot to come down and file his report and then ask Air India, they would be in a better position to give you a correct answer. Now, what happened on the airplane is a very unprecedented activity which may or may not be spurious, but all alarms or warnings are to be taken seriously and not to be determined at that time to be spurious or inaccurate or accurate,” Thomas pointed out.

Captain Sam Thomas on triple hydraulic failure

When asked about triple hydraulic failure, he added, “ Most airplanes have three hydraulic systems. Hydraulic systems are systems that help you move certain parts of the airplane, like the flight controls, brakes, etc., without putting much, you know, superhuman effort. That’s what the hydraulics do. You have triple redundancy as far as all aircraft are concerned, most passenger aircraft are concerned. They may be termed A, B and standby, left hydraulic, right hydraulic and standby, or in this particular case, green, blue and yellow”.