india

Updated: Jul 04, 2019 23:29 IST

The Directorate General of Civil Aviation has issued show-cause notices to four senior SpiceJet officials over alleged safety lapses and asked them to respond in 15 days, two officials said, requesting anonymity.

The alleged lapses pertain to incidents reported in the past 72 hours, in which three SpiceJet flights — Bhopal-Surat, Pune-Kolkata and Jaipur-Mumbai — overshot the runway on landing. The Mumbai aircraft has been stuck since Monday night as engineers struggled to pull it out.

“Show-cause notices have been issued to heads of operations, training, flight safety as well as the accountable manager of the airline based on the recommendation of the team that has done an audit of SpiceJet after these incidents were reported. We have also derostered 12 pilots, of which four are from Air India Express and eight are from private airlines,” said the first DGCA official. “We are extremely concerned with recent incidents of overshoot, skidding, hard landing etc. The airlines have been advised by way of an Air Safety Circular yesterday on precautions to be taken by air operators while planning operations during monsoon,” the DGCA said in a statement Wednesday.

A SpiceJet spokesperson said, “We are in receipt of the show cause notices issued by the DGCA. The concerned officials will submit their replies within the timeframe given by the regulator. Safety is the core value of our operations and is a shared objective of both the DGCA and SpiceJet. We will take all possible steps that may be required to further strengthen our safety mechanism.”