Gracy Tripathy
Port Blair, December 3: A swarm of honeybees held back two Vistara flights at Kolkata airport for one hour each on 29th and 30th November 2020.
One flight was scheduled to Delhi on 29th and Port Blair on 30th. Both the flights weren’t boarded as the bee attack was noticed just before the flight was taken to the runway. To drive away the swarm of bees, fire brigade personnel sprayed water from water cannons. Following the back to back incident, a team of officials from Kolkata airport searched the area and sprayed insecticide in the surrounding places. However, even after an extensive search, no bee hives were spotted in the zone.
Similar incident occurred in September last year, wherein a Kolkata-Agartala Air India flight was delayed by two hours after a swarm of bees attacked the aircraft on the runway taking over the left cockpit glass almost blinding the pilot. It was learnt that no flight is supposed to take off if it has any insect on its body as each aircraft have several small probes, which determine the static pressure and the total pressure of an airflow located in the vicinity of the aircraft. These are extremely sensitive, and even if one bee goes inside the probe, the air speed indicators can go wrong, leading to a major accident.
