 Hello, and welcome to NewsClick. Today we are going to discuss something that happened about a week ago to our very own Pravir Purukha Yasta on a flight from Delhi to New York when the aircraft had a very unexpected and, in retrospect, hair-raising experience. Pravir, so you came, you had a near-death experience on your flight to New York? Not that we felt that. Because the captain did announce that there were some, there were some instrument failures on the craft. And I don't think most people realized what that means when you're still flying. I did think that, you know, what does this instrument failure really mean? But the extent of the failure was only known later. And it does seem that, yes, when you talk about the possibility of an accident, it does seem that the number of systems that it failed were large enough to have, at least for the 370 passengers in the flight and the crew, to have been considered a very, shall we say, near-hair-raising experience. For the sake of our viewers to recap quickly, this was a Boeing 777 aircraft which was about to land at JFK airport in New York and suddenly experienced a loss of all major instrument landing and related instruments due to which it couldn't land at JFK, was running low on fuel, and had to divert to New York airport where it made what's called a non-precision landing, which is essentially landing with the aid of very few instruments. Conspiracy theorists, of course, would love the fact that this happened to you on 9-11 and the fact that the aircraft actually landed safely would by itself have made news. In fact, a lot of people told me that in New York that day, any incident that happens on 9-11 is considered something which is, oh my god, kind of incident. That's right. And anything to do with the aircraft? The people really freak out. So yes, I think the fact that it was an aircraft related issue and that they were forced to avoid JFK with so many passengers on board. And then this was a freak accident because you talked about the instrument failures. If you look at the list of instruments, failed, which of course is pretty large. All the three instrumentation landing systems failed, altimeters failed. So there was a whole range of instrument failures, but they've also seemed to have lost power, at least on some of the engines because the captain did announce that only one engine would be running to keep the power on. The auxiliary power unit seems to have also conked. And we were told to the gate that all these were basic question marks to be that what was the extent of the failure and even opening the gate was a hell of a problem. So all of this did seem to show that there are multiple failures. And it is lucky for the crew that the passengers did not realize it because after two and a half hours in the aircraft, we're not being let out. We are being told all this created a scenario where at the end of it, people are starting to get very antsy. But then they realized what they were really going through. I think they've been far bigger panic in the aircraft. Of course, we will have to await the report of the inquiry, which is bound to be now conducted by Boeing on the one hand and perhaps by DGCA as well because after all, the aircraft left Indian shores after an inspection. Some introspection and back check of the condition of the aircraft, the kinds of inspections that were done also would require to be made. But from what one has seen from the different reports of the failures, et cetera, it appears to be a central electrical systems failure or a failure in what's called the aircraft information management system, the aims, which is the brains of the 777 aircraft because otherwise it's very difficult to explain multiple failures of the kind experience. You really would be able to address much better for our audience, for our viewers, that when you look at the systems, the number of redundancies in the system, it has three instrumentation landing systems. Each of them are supposed to be redundant. It has multiple altimeters. Except one altimeter, all of them had failed. On both sides, their altimeters both had failed. If you look at all of this, this is very difficult to explain with so many redundancies in the system. Why should this scale of malfunction in the market? This is pure hypothesis, of course. But it is likely that something gave in the aims, the aircraft information management system, which is a centralized system, but which links all the other systems together that go with it. And apparently, I've read comment by at least one pilot who has said that a multiple failure like this is not unknown in the Boeing 777 because when you're on an instrument landing approach, the signal switches from one bus to another. And in that process can trip the system completely sometimes. And if that happens, and if you're aware of it, and if you've been trained to anticipate this, then you do what is essentially a reboot of the system. You switch off the systems and re-switch on the ILS and the auto landing system. Nobody seems to have advised the pilot. The ATC didn't. The pilot used his instincts and basic flying skills to land the aircraft virtually manually to do this. But this is something that I think Boeing would have to investigate. Because if this is known to the aircraft manufacturer, then something should be done to prevent the recurrence of such a tripping, which then trips multiple systems despite the redundancies. So the redundancies have a common bit failure in the information management system. Because that fuels everything together. What you're saying is it's a common bus which can cause the trip. So that's the common bit failure possibilities in the system. And that's a very interesting issue because if the 777 that we talked about is nine years old, so if this has gone on for such a long time, this particular mode of failure is not unknown, then why something was not done? A, B, why is there no guidance under such conditions? Exactly. And C, why then landing without the system that there is no guidance on that as well? Because what I understand is that this landing, which the pilots did. They're not trained for it? This is not trained and neither is the Boeing manual. It's not in the Boeing manual either. So these are the two aspects which I think need to be looked at, whether pilot training needs to account for such a multiple failure and how to train a pilot to handle this. And maybe have some good feedback coming in from ground systems, either from ATC or from somebody else. The ACARS system, for example, which links multiple information sources on the ground, should have been able to give some more guidance to the pilot. Which it seems it did in some sense because the pilot was coming in a little low. That is just normal ATC guidance saying, you look like you're too low, pilot would have made some correction and then landed. So pilot training is one part, whether the guidance could be stepped up for such an eventuality. But certainly, I think Boeing needs to look at the information management system on the aircraft to try and see that this is prevented. The other question I wanted to ask you is that it's easy to blame Air India in a particular case because Air India has been sick. So there is a loss, shall we say, of a land in the aircraft. Loss of confidence, maybe, of the passengers in the airlines itself. But the safety rankings are not bad. All the latest rankings that we see, Air India ranks along with Air France and a whole lot of other ones. And there, among the top 60 airlines, there are around 40, which actually makes them above Air France, for example. So it's not a bad record, no, it's not the best record. No question, but it's not either a bad record. In other air rating systems, it has six stars. And the maximum is seven. So again, it doesn't make it very poor. So this was not a kind of maintenance failure because I could understand maintenance failure means one instrument failure. But multiple instruments failing systems were not very easy. I would, however, look at two aspects in this. One is there was a report a few months ago about some 777 aircraft. I'm not sure whether it included this one or not, which were grounded for some time because of a lack of spares. And it will be interesting to know whether it was this aircraft or some other. The other is something which I have at least felt for a long time. India needs to have a separation between its airworthiness approval agency, which is the DGCA, and its accident inquiry agency, which unfortunately is, again, the DGCA. And this is not a correct situation at all. There should be complete separation between investigation and airworthiness clearance. You can't have it all rolled up into one agency because if DGCA has cleared the aircraft, you can't expect DGCA to find fault with itself. So I think that's something that needs to be done. That initially regulatory agencies had, they were rolled into the operating agency as well. Which needs to be done. We did not have the kind of skill set that the time took to the agency. But now we should. I'm misconfident. The last question, the pilots are really to be congratulated on keeping a cool head. Absolutely. Landing on one altimeter, no instrumentation landing systems available, with fuel running low, and not a very good condition either, because the atmosphere is terrible weather conditions. Bad weather conditions. And I must say, I've listened to the ATC conversations between the pilot and the ATC. The transcripts have come in most of the papers, but I've heard the ATC recordings extremely cool. The pilots really need to be commanded for maintaining their cool, taking a decision smoothly, and then being able to land the aircraft virtually, manually, without specific guidance in that direction. I think it was a fantastic effort. And I must confess that the landing is fairly smooth. It wasn't any different from any other landing I have had. And sometimes other landings with full instruments have been much more clear. So I would say that we need to give really. Absolutely. I think it was a fantastic job for that. Whatever the final report says, whether it's from Boeing or DGCA, I hope the final report also records the fantastic job done by the pilots. So thank you again, Praveer, and welcome back to this country safe and sound.