SpiceJet Issued Show Cause Notice After 8 Malfunction Incidents In 18 Days
Mumbai: Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has issued a show-cause notice to budget carrier SpiceJet after the airline reported eight malfunction incidents in the last 18 days.
The DGCA said that SpiceJet has failed to establish safe, efficient and reliable air services under the Aircraft Rules, 1937. It further said that DGCA’s audit of SpiceJet in September 2021 found that component suppliers were not being paid on a regular basis, leading to shortfalls of spare parts.
Sharing the notice issued by DGCA, Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia wrote on Twitter that passenger safety is paramount.
https://twitter.com/JM_Scindia/status/1544599754541125632?s=20&t=Titz0_H9hXK0psj1bi3DJw
The DGCA said that on several occasions, “the aircraft either returned to its originating station or continued to land at the destination with a poor safety margin.”
Stating that SpiceJet has thus failed to establish “reliable, safe and efficient airline services”, it issued a show-cause notice asking why “action should not be taken against the company”.
This comes a day after incidents were reported on three different SpiceJet aircraft.
A SpiceJet Q400 aircraft operating SG 3324 from Kandla in Gujarat was forced to make a priority landing in Mumbai on Tuesday after its windshield broke in the middle of the wind. The aircraft was at an altitude of 23,000 feet at the time of the malfunction.
In another incident, SpiceJet’s Delhi-Dubai flight was diverted to Karachi as the fuel indicator started failing. The Boeing 737 MAX aircraft made an emergency landing at Karachi airport at around 9:15 am after Pakistani civil aviation authorities allowed the Indian aircraft to land at Jinnah International Airport on humanitarian grounds.
Due to this, 138 passengers were stranded in Karachi for about 11 hours after taking off from New Delhi in the morning.
In the third incident, a China-bound SpiceJet cargo plane returned to Kolkata on Tuesday after pilots realized that the aircraft’s weather radar was not working.
This made it at least the eighth incident of a technical malfunction affecting a SpiceJet aircraft in the last 18 days, and the third one to have taken place on Tuesday itself.
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