Passengers on an Air India Express flight had a tense few minutes on Monday when oil levels in one of the aircraft's engines began dropping rapidly mid-air on a route from Kochi to Abu Dhabi. The crew responded by shutting down the affected engine as a precaution, and the aircraft was brought back and landed safely at Kochi International Airport.
Flight IX 415, a Boeing 737, forced to turn back
The aircraft involved was Air India Express flight IX 415, which had already taken off from Kochi bound for Abu Dhabi before it had to reverse course mid-journey. The plane was a Boeing 737. During the flight, the crew noticed that fuel, or oil, levels in Engine-1 were falling sharply. Once the oil pressure reached a dangerous threshold, the crew decided without delay to shut the engine down. The aircraft was subsequently landed safely back at Kochi airport.
The call was made at 36,000 feet
According to information attributed to sources, the pilot and co-pilot first noticed the rapid drop in Engine-1's oil level around 50 minutes after takeoff. At that point, the aircraft was cruising at an altitude of roughly 36,000 feet. Faced with the warning at that altitude, the crew carried out a FORDEC assessment, a structured decision-making model used by pilots to work through emergency or complex situations step by step. Since the oil level kept falling steadily, the crew chose not to risk continuing on to Abu Dhabi. Instead, they decided to turn the aircraft around and head back to Kochi so it could be landed safely before the situation worsened.
A close call at Mumbai airport just weeks earlier
Notably, a major accident was narrowly avoided at Mumbai airport back in July, when an Air India aircraft and an Air India Express aircraft came face to face on the same runway. According to reports at the time, the Air India Express aircraft had already landed but had not yet cleared the runway. At the same moment, an Air India flight bound for Delhi was preparing to take off from that very runway. As the two aircraft appeared set to collide, air traffic control, or ATC, stepped in immediately and issued instructions that halted the Air India flight's takeoff, averting what could have been a serious accident.
Incidents like these can appear alarming from the outside, but airline crews worldwide are specifically trained to handle exactly this kind of scenario. Treating any warning about engine oil level or pressure as serious and taking immediate precautionary action is standard operating procedure. That discipline is why everyone aboard the Kochi to Abu Dhabi flight, crew and passengers alike, made it back to Kochi safely and without incident.
