CHENNAI: The annual anti-hijack drill at the Chennai airport on Tuesday turned out to be a comedy of errors.

The exercise coordinated by several agencies including CISF, Indian Coast Guard, Indian Army and the local police was supposed to test the airport’s preparedness in handling an emergency if a hijacked passenger aircraft lands at the airport. It ended up being a series of mistakes which but for its grave import would have been a comic show.

To begin with, there was communication gap between the ‘hijacker’ (a Hindi-speaking CISF man) and the ‘negotiator,’ who couldn’t speak Hindi. “Hijacker, hijacker,” the negotiator, an intelligence officer, shouted into the microphone. And the reply was “Yes, Yes” followed by a few words in Hindi. The negotiator fumbled as he did not know the language and continued in English. The Hindi-speaking hijacker apparently didn’t understand anything for the first few minutes.

While confusion prevailed in the control room, hijackers ‘shot down’ a hostage and the ‘body’ was thrown out of the bus used as a mock aircraft. “Yes”, said the negotiator in response, “now don’t harm anymore!”

An officer privy to the exercise later said the harm was already done as the whole drill turned out to be a “tamasha.”

The exercise was designed around a scenario in which a Trivandrum-Singapore Indigo Airlines flight was hijacked and diverted to Chennai airport. The ‘flight’ landed at 3.13pm and the ‘pilot’ was told to ‘taxi’ to an isolated parking bay. “A command post was established within two minutes to coordinate with security agencies,” said an official. Security observers took positions at the apron area, control towers, command posts, anti-hijack control room, hostage reception centre and emergency medical centre by 3.17pm.

A crash tender was driven to the taxiway and parked in front of the ‘hijacked aircraft’ to prevent it from taking off in case negotiations failed. But a review of the exercise showed that the crash tender was parked wrongly, leaving a lot of space for the plane to take off, said a security observer.

Local police personnel who took part in the exercise were at a loss when the ‘negotiations’ were happening. “Many of them did not understand messages given over the radio channel. There was also a lack of coordination among the participants in shifting the ‘seriously injured’ passengers to the emergency medical centre.

A deputy secretary of the state home department and the chairman of aerodrome committee witnessed the drill. An official release from the Airports Authority of India on Tuesday said, “The mock exercise proved to be successful and was as per expectations. An in-depth analysis was undertaken and recommendations made by the members were noted for consideration to make improvement to the contingency plan.”