Italian aviation accident regulators have opened an investigation into an alarming incident in which an Airbus A320 operated by the Moroccan subsidiary of low-cost airline Air Arabia ‘plummeted’ towards the Mediterranean Sea just seconds after takeoff from Catania Airport on the island of Sicily.
Flight Details
- Airline: Air Arabia Maroc (ICAO designator: MAC)
- Aircraft: Airbus A320-200
- Age: 14 years old
- Registration: CN-NML
- Route: Catania (CTA) – Amman (AMM)
- Flight number: 3O-991
The hair-raising near-miss occurred on September 20 but is only now coming to light after Italy’s ANSV aviation regulator announced it was investigating the occurrence as a ‘serious incident.’
In a statement, the ANSV said that shortly after takeoff from Runway 08 at Catania Airport, the pilots received an automated so-called ‘Ground Proximity Warning System’ or GPWS in the cockpit with the system bellowing at the crew to “PULL UP” to avoid crashing into the sea.
The 14-year-old Airbus A320 was being operated by a subsidiary of Air Arabia, a low-cost airline that originally started in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. At the time of the incident, there were only two pilots and four cabin crew members onboard as this was a ‘ferry flight’ without any passengers.
As the aircraft took off, it initially climbed to around 350 feet before suddenly dipping to 230 feet before the pilots took emergency corrective measures to get the plane to start climbing again.
The ANSV said the plane came within a “short distance” of the surface of the sea before climbing again and continuing the flight to Amman without further incident.
The incident occurred at night, so the pilots wouldn’t have had visual clues of how close they were to the sea, but investigators are still trying to get to the bottom of exactly what went so drastically wrong.
There is, of course, plenty of speculation over the cause of this near-miss, while commentators have raised concerns about Air Arabia Maroc’s safety record.
Just days before this incident, another Air Arabia A320 was on final approach to Montpellier Airport in France when the pilots decided to perform a go-around because another plane was still on the runway they were cleared to land on.
As the aircraft turned eastwards, it quickly started to catch up on a private Diamond DA-42 aircraft, resulting in a T-CAS alert in the cockpit – this is the ‘Traffic Alert and Collision Avoidance System’ which provides emergency automated instructions to avoid a mid-air collision.
French air accident investigators are still probing this incident.
“Positive rate, flaps up”