A sudden lack of air, screams between the seats and passengers thrown onto the ceiling. For a few interminable seconds, Air India flight AI-2379, which departed from Phuket and headed to Delhi with 145 people on board, turned into a high-altitude nightmare. A violent oscillation of approximately ninety meters which caused seventeen injuries among passengers and crew. But what was initially dismissed as turbulence is becoming a much more complex and disturbing mystery.
The incident occurred while the Airbus A320neo was cruising at around 11,000 meters above eastern India. The downward acceleration was so sudden that it hit anyone who wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and the flight attendants busy with service. Eight passengers and four crew members ended up in hospital.
In the first hours after landing in Delhi, which occurred without making an emergency stop at the nearest airport, the company’s explanation seemed straightforward: extremely violent turbulence encountered along the route. Simple and reassuring explanation. In the following hours, however, Air India removed any reference to the turbulence from its press releases, speaking ambiguously of a “sudden loss of altitude”. Then the note from the Directorate General of Indian Civil Aviation completely changed the scenario: the origin of the event may have been a “transient technical fault”.
The thrilling hypothesis: three circuits out of order?
To understand the scope of the suspicion we need to look at the structure of the plane. The Airbus A320 uses three independent hydraulic circuits (called Green, Blue and Yellow) which serve to move the pilot surfaces. The presence of three separate systems serves precisely to guarantee that, in the event of a failure in one circuit, the others continue to fly the aircraft safely. The Indian Pilots’ Association has launched a sensational hypothesis: during the flight, all three hydraulic systems would have failed at the same time.
According to this reconstruction, to avoid a stall or loss of control, the commander ordered the first officer to immediately lower the nose of the plane. A timely intervention carried out in a fraction of a second that would have saved the aircraft, but caused such a negative force of gravity as to throw people against the cabin ceiling before the seat belt sign could even be turned on.
The “triple failure” thesis, if confirmed, would represent an exceptionally serious event for civil aviation. Precisely for this reason experts urge caution.
It is difficult to match a total blockage of the hydraulic controls with what happened immediately afterwards: the plane stabilized, continued to fly for another hour and a half and landed regularly at its destination. It is more likely that it was a temporary drop in pressure or an electronic error in the on-board computers, capable of generating a cascade of “phantom” alarms while leaving the systems physically operational. The truth is now entrusted to the flight data recorder and the cabin conversation recorder
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