Air India plane engine catches fire; passengers, crew safe

Two engines of an Air India aircraft bound for Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, caught fire due to a fuel leakage minutes before take-off on Friday, forcing evacuation of 213 passengers and 16 crew.

Some passengers suffered scratches while sliding down the chutes. A few of them were bruised as they ran towards the runway in panic and fell into a drain, a Mumbai International Airport Ltd (Mial) official said.

Five fire-tenders doused the flames in 10 minutes, but Mial officials said things could
have been worse with almost 1.20 lakh litres of aviation turbine fuel in the aircraft. “And what if the fire had broken out after take-off?” the official said.  

The airline ordered an inquiry into the mishap, and also de-rostered the aircraft maintenance engineer supervising the flight as per standard practice, the Air India spokesperson said.

Originally scheduled for departure at 5.40am on Friday, the flight (AI 829) seemed to be jinxed from the beginning. While taxiing on runway 27 for departure, the pilot detected “a problem in the aircraft’s left engine and abandoned takeoff”, the AI official said.

The aircraft was taken back to the bay, and the passengers were deplaned and taken to the transit lounge. They boarded the second aircraft, a Boeing 747-437, at 9.50am.
At 10.49am, when the second plane was proceeding through taxiway A3 towards the runway, an official from Mial’s operations department saw fuel leaking from the left wing of the Boeing and immediately informed the air traffic control (ATC).

“The ATC asked the pilot to switch off the engines, but the first engine had caught fire,” the official said, adding that the flames soon spread to the second engine on the left wing. Boeing 747 has four engines — two on each wing.

While five fire-engines reached the spot within two minutes, all six emergency chutes were released to evacuate the passengers and the crew. Air India said that passengers were evacuated only from the right side of the plane since the fire had broken out in the left wing. The passengers were taken to the transit lounge of terminal 2C at Sahar.

The fire also posed danger to two aircraft parked close to the Boeing 747, a Mial official said. The aircraft blocked the taxiway for almost three hours before it was towed away to the bay at 2.35pm.

It was only at 4pm that the passengers boarded the third plane, which took off for Riyadh after 6.30pm. Captain Mohan Ranganathan, an aviation expert, said the fuel leak was detected by an airport staff member, and not an engineer. “It is the engineer’s duty to properly check the aircraft after fuelling,” he said. The fire engines should have reached the spot “within 30 seconds according to the international standards”, not two minutes, he added.

When contacted a Director General of Civil Aviation official said that this incident was a serious lapse and the matter is under investigation.