PATNA: A JetLite flight from Mumbai to Patna via Ranchi with 95 passengers on board had a close call as it suffered a bird hit while landing at the Jayaprakash Narayan International Airport here on Wednesday morning.
The S2-721 flight took off from Mumbai at 5.40am and landed at Ranchi at 7:55am from where it took off for Patna at 8:35am. As the Boeing-737 approached the Patna airport around 9.20am, its nose hit an eagle at an altitude of 1,000 metres.
Though the commander landed the plane safely, he asked for a thorough technical inspection of the aircraft before flying it to Mumbai. While JetLite's three Patna-based engineers detected few snags, sources said, another technical team reached Patna from Delhi by the JetLite's afternoon flight to help them remove the snags.
Some of the stranded flyers, scheduled to take connecting flights from Mumbai, were flown to Delhi by JetLite's Patna-Delhi flight, S2-287, around 1.30pm en route to Mumbai.
The Mumbai flight was given clearance at 3.30pm, but the captain decided against taking off with all the passengers aboard due to high air temperature. As the airline's move to offload ten flyers met with stiff resistance, the plane finally took off at 5:30pm when the temperature fell.
A JetLite statement later attributed the grounding of the plane to an inspection by its engineering team. It did not talk about any bird hit.
The incident also delayed a GoAir Patna-Delhi flight by 50 minutes as its pilot spotted an eagle's cadaver on the runway.
Crows and eagles in the sky over the Patna airport are not an uncommon sight as there are quite a few slaughterhouses nearby, in the northwest of the airport.
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