Two pilots fall asleep as flight misses landing in Addis Ababa
Darpan News Desk IANS, 19 Aug, 2022 12:49 PM
Addis Ababa, Aug 19 (IANS) Two pilots are believed to have fallen asleep and missed their landing during a flight from Sudan to Ethiopia, media reports said.
The incident took place onboard an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737-800 enroute from Khartoum to Addis Ababa, according to a report by commercial aviation news site Aviation Herald, CNN reported.
Data obtained by the website indicates that the aircraft was cruising at 37,000 feet on autopilot when it failed to descend at Addis Ababa Bole International Airport, its scheduled destination, on August 15.
Air traffic control were apparently unable to reach the crew despite making several attempts at contact. However, an alarm was triggered when the plane overshot the runway and continued along the route, CNN reported.
The aircraft subsequently began to descend, landing safely around 25 minutes later.
Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) data shows the aircraft overflying the runway, before beginning its descent and maneuvering for another approach.
Aviation analyst Alex Macheras has since taken to Twitter to express his shock at the "deeply concerning incident," which he suggests may have been the result of pilot exhaustion.
"Pilot fatigue is nothing new, and continues to pose one of the most significant threats to air safety -- internationally," he tweeted on Thursday.
The report comes just months after pilots at Southwest Airlines and Delta Air Lines warned airline executives that pilot exhaustion was on the rise and urged them to treat fatigue and the resulting mistakes as a safety risk.
"Fatigue, both acute and cumulative, has become Southwest Airlines' number-one safety threat," the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, or SWAPA, told airline executives in a letter back in April, CNN reported.
He had been injured in a shootout between a passenger in his car and the teenager who was also injured in the exchange of fire and remained hospitalised, the station said.
The searing parallels that bookend the two decades — shaken commanders-in-chief promising retribution for a devastating suicide attack; triumphant Taliban militants in Afghanistan and a military transport fleeing Kabul — might suggest little has changed. Of course, since Sept. 11, virtually everything has.
Mu, also known as B.1.621, was first identified from Colombia in January this year. Infections from Mu have since been recorded in South America and Europe. Based on the latest round of assessments, B.1.621 was classified as a VOI on 30 August 2021 and given the WHO label "Mu".
The militant group's metamorphosis from rag-tag guerrilla force to highly professional, impressively equipped army has been at the expense of Western taxpayers, the report said.
"Russia should be concerned about the rise of the Taliban. The country will become a terrorist hub that will endanger Central Asia and Russia itself," Fahim Dashty told The Moscow Times by phone from the Panjshir Valley, where his resistance group has gathered as the country's last holdout against the Taliban.
On Thursday evening, a suicide bombing rocked a gate of the airport where a crashing crowd was waiting for evacuation flights, and later another explosion hit the nearby Baron Camp, a former coalition base.
