KLM Skips New Hyderabad Airport

KarmaDude Mar 24, 2008 2 Comments

Shamshabad

In a slip-up barely hours after the Shamshabad airport opened for business, a KLM flight from Amsterdam, which was supposed to land at Hyderabad, skipped the airport and flew across the country — first to Delhi, and then to Mumbai.

Imagine the ordeal of the 243 passengers on board!

This reminded me of something similar which happened to me about ten years back. I was on an Indian Airlines flight from Delhi to Ranchi and somehow the pilot got confused and headed to Jamshedpur to land, which is about 132km southeast of Ranchi. On his final approach he realized he was at the wrong place, and quickly aborted the landing and turned towards Ranchi. Everyone familiar with Ranchi, who looked out the window could tell the pilot was in the wrong city. It was only a few days later when we saw the news of the pilot error in the newspaper, was our suspicion confirmed.

Photo by: Mark D. Martin

2 Comments

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Jason
Mar 26, 2008 | 3:43 am
I was on the flight and the article is not actually accurate. During the entire 10 hour flight the captain would give us updates about whether the new airport was actually open or not (it had been delayed several times). He confirmed it was as we descended. There was low cloud cover, and at the last minute he abandoned the landing. We circled for 25 minutes and tried again, still fog, abandoned again. He came on the PA and said based on lack of fuel, fog, and what he said was lack of working instruments from the airport itself, we had to divert. We got half way to Delhi, they said there were no hotels there, and we went to Mumbai instead. 4.5 hours on the tarmac later, we went to a hotel for the day, came back, took off again, and finally landed 24 hours later at Hyderabad. I had a colleuge on the Lufthansa flight which was the first to land, and another which took off a day later than I did and beat me to the baggage claim.

The KLM plane was an MD11 which is acient. So I’m guessing there was an instrument mismatch between the airport and the plane which caused the confusion…
KarmaDude
Mar 26, 2008 | 8:33 am
Jason, thank you for the passenger perspective on this. How long were you on the flight?