Plane landing incident in Romania pits local airline against Cluj-Napoca airport’s management

The landing incident that occurred on Thursday morning (January 7), when a Blue Air plane slipped off the runway of the Cluj-Napoca international airport, has started a conflict between the airline and the airport’s management. The Blue Air charter plane that was going from Bucharest to Barcelona went 10 meters off track when making a landing in Cluj-Napoca to pick up some more passengers. None of the 116 people on board (110 passengers and 6 crew members) were injured. However, the incident caused panic among the passengers, according to Digi24 news station. The first to speak about the incident was the Cluj-Napoca airport’s manager David Ciceo. He said that the conditions for landing were adequate when the plane touched the ground. “The pilots asked the control tower to allow the plane to land urgently because it didn’t have enough fuel. The runway was just being cleared by snow removal machines, but the conditions were adequate. On a scale of 1 to 5, where one is the worst and 5 is the best, the breaking conditions on the runway were a 3. Given that it was snowing, the conditions for landing were adequate,” Ciceo said, according to Digi24. His statement was firmly disputed by the airline’s representatives who said that the plane had enough fuel. Blue Air publicly asked Ciceo to withdraw his statements and to apologize for “deliberately misinforming the public and the Blue Air passengers”. “The plane took off from Otopeni (Bucharest’s international airport) with enough fuel to complete its flight mission, to fly over the destination airport for a limited time, and to reach a backup airport with at least the minimum legal fuel reserve,” reads a Blue Air statement. The plane had 3 tons of fuel left after it landed in Cluj-Napoca, enough for it to fly more than an hour, according to the company’s representatives. “At no time during the flight has the crew asked for an emergency landing due to lack of fuel or any other reason,” Blue Air’s representatives underlined. The plane took off from Otopeni at 7:05 AM. As it was approaching Cluj-Napoca, the crew contacted the airport’s control tower and was told to wait until the machines finished clearing the snow on the runway, which was estimated for 7:50 AM. At 7:51 AM, the pilot again contacted the control tower and got the permission to land. The landing was completed at 8:00 AM, according to Blue Air. The airline also said that the pilot complied with all of the plane’s and the company’s operational rules. During landing, he noticed that the breaking conditions were not consistent with the data he received before getting the approval for landing. In other words, the conditions for landing were worse than the report showed. Pilots rely on reports they receive from the Romanian Air Traffic Services Administration ROMATSA via the flight controllers. As the incident caused many speculations on who was to blame, ROMATSA issued a statement on Thursday saying that its flight controllers have complied with the procedures and informed the plane’s crew of the landing conditions, which they had received from the airport’s personnel. “ROMATSA has no attributes in clearing the runway or evaluating the landing conditions. ROMATSA only receives information about the runway’s status from the airport and passes it to the pilots,” the company said. Due to the contradictory statements following the incident, the prosecutors have decided to open a criminal investigation.