Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport witnessed a heart-stopping moment on Tuesday night when two Air India group aircraft came dangerously close to a runway collision, averted only by swift intervention from air traffic control.
The incident unfolded around 10 pm. An Air India Express Boeing 737 MAX 8, flight AIX1547, had just landed and was yet to clear the runway when a Delhi-bound Air India Boeing 777-300ER, flight AI816, was cleared to begin its take-off roll on the same stretch. For a few tense seconds, the two aircraft were effectively on a collision course.
It was the alertness of the air traffic controller that prevented what could have been a catastrophic accident. The controller spotted the conflict and instructed the AI816 crew to abandon the take-off immediately. The pilots complied without delay, aborting the roll and taxiing the wide-body jet safely back to the bay.
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Air India confirmed the sequence of events in an official statement, noting that the crew operating AI816 discontinued the take-off run after receiving instructions from ATC and returned to the bay. The airline underlined that established safety protocols were followed throughout, and no passengers or crew were harmed.
While the quick save prevented disaster, the episode has reignited concerns about ground and runway safety. This is the second such ground-safety scare involving Air India in under a month. Just weeks earlier, an Air India aircraft and an IndiGo aircraft had come face to face on the ground at Ahmedabad airport, prompting similar questions about coordination and safety margins.
Aviation experts point out that runway incursions, even when caught in time, expose gaps in real-time coordination between ATC and flight crews, especially at high-traffic airports like Mumbai, which handles a dense mix of domestic and international movements through the day. Mumbai airport is among the busiest single-runway-dependent hubs in the country during certain hours, making precise sequencing critical.
For now, the swift call by the controller and the disciplined response from the AI816 cockpit crew have been credited with preventing tragedy. But with back-to-back ground incidents surfacing within weeks of each other, the spotlight is firmly back on India’s safety oversight and on airport-level protocols that are meant to catch exactly this kind of error before it turns fatal.
