- Jul 20, 2016
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An Air India flight from New Delhi was on route for a landing at JFK in New York, when a bunch of systems failed. In a nutshell, the pilot had to make a manual landing at Newark, New Jersey. Even the ILS, instrument landing system, was offline. Trying to land a jet without that is darn near impossible. The pilot is credited with saving 370 lives. I think there was another "pilot" in that cockpit.
https://www.rt.com/news/438719-air-india-plane-pilot-landing/
The commander in charge of the 15-hour flight could be heard fretting approximately 38 minutes prior to landing, as he called Air Traffic Control in New York to say: “We're really, you know, stuck, and there’s no fuel.”
Flight AI-101 Captain Rustom Palia went on to described how there was only one radioaltimeter functioning and the Traffic Collision and Avoidance System had failed.
In a stomach-twisting account of the technical faults they were facing, Palia added that there was “no Auto-land, no wind-shear systems, [no] Auto Speed Brake, and the Auxiliary Power Unit is unserviceable as well.”
Prospects became even bleaker when the pilots discovered they couldn't even rely on the automatic landing system, namely the Instrument Landing System (ILS) receivers.
These are crucial for a plane landing on the right path in bad weather, which the Boeing 777-300 was in the process of doing that day.
https://www.rt.com/news/438719-air-india-plane-pilot-landing/