Two Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) planes narrowly avoided a disaster that could have cost hundreds of human lives.
As per Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) sources, due to a technical error in the air traffic controller system, two PIA planes nearly escaped a head-on collision mid-air thanks to a timely response from the pilots.
The two PIA flights, PK-352 and PK-786, came very close to each other and could have collided, but a swift maneuver averted the crash.
As per details, PIA’s flight PK-352 was headed to Islamabad while PK-785 flight was moving towards London from Islamabad. Due to the air traffic controller’s mistake, both planes were given the same flight level, which brought them head-on above the airspace of Cherat. Thanks to the quick response from the pilots, a disaster was averted.
However, the incident hasn’t gone unnoticed among the higher-ups of the aviation authority, which has set up a high-level inquiry into the incident.
This is the second such incident in the past three months, as two passenger planes narrowly escaped a mid-air collision in Karachi’s airspace.
In that incident, a PIA flight en route from Islamabad to Karachi was awarded the altitude of 40,000 feet, whereas a foreign airliner was at 35,000 feet. The two planes were less than five miles apart, the sources said.
if air traffic controllers fail to keep planes apart from each other then there’s a built-in safety system in planes Called TCAS= Traffic Collision Avoidance System. TCAS kicks in when it detects that two planes are dangerously close to each other and quickly alerts both the pilots to either go up or down.
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Pakistan needs to reform its airspace asap