In this edition a rather big news item in HERALD about a "heavy landing" at Dabolim has apparently been overlooked. Titled "Air traffic disrupted as flight makes heavy landing" it refers to an event on Thursday (Jan 6) night. It seems a small 52-seater relief plane sent from Mumbai to Goa to evacuate passengers stranded due to the cancellation of an earlier (3:25 pm?) afternoon flight from Goa landed heavily on its second round trip that evening/night. No injuries were reported in the incident which occurred at 10:30 pm. Following. the incident the Navy closed the runway and normal operations resumed at 8:30 am on Friday. A private airline carrying Rajya Sabha MP Vijay Mallya enroute from Delhi to Goa and scheduled to arrive around midnight was diverted to Mumbai. Nine chartered flights scheduled to arrive on Friday morning from 4:30 am onwards were either kept on hold or diverted to other airports. The morning flights of IA and Jet were delayed till the runway was cleared. Although the stranded passengers were able to leave on Friday afternoon 1:30 pm by a scheduled Air Sahara flight, some of them missed their onward connections on international flights.
The interesting thing about this report is that it makes reference to operations at Dabolim at night and very early in the morning. No mention is however made of the condition of the plane involved.
