It’s every aviator’s nightmare, a fully fuelled Boeing 747 jumbo jet catching fire. That’s exactly what happened to an Air India jetliner on Friday in Mumbai as it was taxiing for take off.

Fortunately, all the passengers were safely evacuated. In fact, the nightmare for these passengers had started much earlier.

First, their original plane had a technical snag, then their replacement plane caught fire by the time they got a third plane, some passengers had had enough and 16 people said they’d rather fly another airline.

A major tragedy for the 213 passengers aboard Air India’s Boeing 747-400 was averted somehow in time.

The troublesome journey began at 4.30 am when the flight to Riyadh was aborted because it developed a snag in the engine. The passengers were deplaned at made to wait for over six hours for another aircraft.

At 10:50 am, another AI flight began its journey to Riyadh. While still on the taxiway, suddenly smoke started bellowing out from the extreme left engine under the wings.

Then there were flames, and 3 fire engines rushed in to douse the flames as airline crew evacuated passengers on emergency slides.

In 10 minutes, the fire was out and the crew and passengers on safe ground. Bystanders at the airport heard about it and became edgy.

“I am really shocked. Airlines need to prioritise safety,” said a traveler.

“It’s just an accident really, could have happened anywhere,” said another traveler.

For Air India though it’s one accident too often.

Not a first incident involving an Air-India flight. Earlier this year, a door of an Air-India flight was damaged during take-off. All these incidents have raised serious questions about the safety of this cash-strapped airline.

For today’s fire Air India has de-rostered an aircraft maintenance engineer and it has also ordered an investigation. Air India has set up a four-member team to probe the Mumbai plane fire.

The four-member committee formed to probe the helicopter crash met for the first time in Delhi on Friday. The committee will submit a report to the government in 2 months.

Sources say the black box of the helicopter has been found. This is an important first step to piece together what exactly caused this accident. If the black box is damaged then the help of the manufacturers will be sought.

But given its past record this may not be the last flight on Air-India’s runaway of horrors.

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