'Around 30 flight incidents occur every day, majority have no safety implications'

New Delhi: About 30 flight incidents happen every day in the country and a majority of them have no safety implications, Arun Kumar, chief of aviation regulator DGCA, said on Wednesday.

The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) issued a show-cause notice Wednesday to SpiceJet after its planes had eight technical malfunctions over the past 18 days.

In a statement on Wednesday, Kumar said: "On an average, about 30 incidents do take place, which includes go around, missed approaches, diversion, medical emergencies, weather issues, bird hits, runway incursion, runway excursion et al."

"Most of them have no safety implications. On the contrary, they are sine qua non (essential condition) of a robust safety management system," he added.

In its show-cause notice to SpiceJet, the DGCA said the airline has failed to "establish safe, efficient and reliable air services" under the terms of Rule 134 and Schedule XI of the Aircraft Rules, 1937.

In an interview on Wednesday, SpiceJet CMD Ajay Singh said that a lot of incidents that are being reported are relatively minor in nature and happen to every airline.

"This is nothing unique," he added.

''When you have thousands of flights, sometimes the air conditioning will fail, sometimes a bird will hit the plane, and sometimes a fuel indicator will light up.

"These things are going to happen and, of course, we have to minimise that to the greatest extent possible. That is our job and it is the regulator's job to push us to make things better, which we will do," he noted.

On Tuesday, a SpiceJet freighter aircraft, which was heading to Chongqing in China, returned to Kolkata as the pilots realised after the take-off that its weather radar was not

working.