CHENNAI: Seventeen passengers on board a 60-seater Kingfisher Airlines’ Chennai-Tiruchirapalli flight had a miraculous escape after one of its tyres burst while landing at the Chennai International Airport here late last night. Following this, flights were delayed for over two hours, thus blocking the runway till it was repaired. According to airport sources, it was a long night for 17 passengers who were originally destined for Tiruchy aboard a Kingfisher (IT 4343) flight that was supposed to depart at 8.45 pm on Friday. After a delay of over an hour, the flight departed and entered Tiruchy airspace where they encountered inclement weather. After circling for an hour, the flight was asked to return to Chennai, added the source.At around 12.15 am, the flight landed at Chennai. During touchdown, two front tyres of the plane’s nosewheel punctured and the plane ground to a halt. “The plane was stranded on the runway till the tyres were replaced,” said AAI Airport Director E P Hareendranathan.The passengers were offloaded safely after the incident and taken to the terminal, said a well informed source. “None of them were injured, merely shaken at the incident,” he added.As the aircraft was on the only operational runway, repair crews worked fast to replace the tyres before the plane could be towed away to the hangar. “This took close to an hour-and-a-half after which the scheduled flights had to be despatched,” the Director said.However, sources said that it was a little before 2.30 am when flight traffic resumed at the airport. They also said that five flights scheduled for departure were delayed due to this incident, while an inbound Lufthansa flight was diverted to Bangalore.The Director said that DGCA would be probing into the matter and only after their report could they ascertain the cause for the incident.
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