Ariana Afghan Flight Lands on Wrong Runway at Delhi Airport, Triggering Major Safety Scare
Ariana flight triggers major safety violation at India’s busiest airport.
An Ariana Afghan Airlines flight from Kabul triggered a heart-stopping near-miss at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport on Sunday afternoon when the aircraft executed a full landing on Runway 29R, a strip that was officially designated exclusively for departures under the prevailing operational plan, exposing a critical failure in runway assignment protocol that could have ended in one of India’s worst aviation disasters.
Flight FG 311, an ageing Airbus A310 twin-jet carrying passengers and crew from Kabul, touched down at precisely 12:07 pm on the 4,000-metre-long 29R runway while the parallel 29L remained the sole designated arrival strip, directly contradicting the active NOTAM and tower instructions in force at that hour, instantly setting off emergency alerts across the airport’s integrated control systems.
The gravity of the incident becomes clear when considering that a departing aircraft accelerating to rotation speed on 29R would have had mere seconds to abort take-off upon sighting the incoming Ariana jet; aviation safety experts note that the absence of any aircraft in take-off position at that exact moment was the sole factor that prevented a high-speed collision with potentially hundreds of fatalities.
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Although Delhi’s parallel runway complex (29L/29R) allows operational flexibility and occasional swapping based on wind direction, tailwind limits, or air traffic volume, authoritative sources confirmed that no configuration change had been authorised or communicated at the time of the incident, leaving investigators to examine whether the Afghan crew deliberately selected the wrong runway due to misinterpretation of ATC instructions or whether Delhi Tower inadvertently issued clearance for the incorrect strip.
The Directorate General of Civil Aviation, Airports Authority of India, and Bureau of Civil Aviation Security have jointly launched a high-priority inquiry involving complete radar replay, digital flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder downloads from the Ariana aircraft, full ATC audio transcripts, and detailed questioning of the Afghan flight crew, Indian controllers, and ground movement supervisors to determine exact responsibility and ensure such a life-threatening breach never recurs at one of the world’s busiest single-runway-operation airports.
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