National Lok Dal leader Ajit Singh had a scare today evening when his plane made an emergency landing at the Palam (domestic) airport. The incident took place at 5.17 pm. Apart from Ajit Singh, there were three other persons on board the four-seater aircraft — a media photographer, the pilot, and the co-pilot. Airport Director, P.S. Nair said, ‘‘The incident occurred when the nose wheel of this Trans Bharat executive aircraft went in instead of coming out at the time of landing.’’ The plane went off the runway, but the situation was brought under control immediately and no flights were disrupted, he said. The secondary runway was opened to enable other operations. The disabled plane was removed from the runway by 8.40 pm, Nair said. Singh was returning from Jhunjunu, near Udaipur in Rajasthan, after attending a day-long public meeting. The flight took off at 4 pm and was supposed to land here at 5.10 pm. Later, Singh left for Lucknow by a Jet Airways flight at 7.20 pm to attend the vote of confidence scheduled for tomorrow. This was the third emergency landing to have occurred at the airport in Delhi this year. The first one was when Air India’s Mumbai-New York flight AI-111 was delayed for 20 hours at the Indira Gandhi International (IGI) airport. According to reports, the plane developed techincal problems due to a birdhit. The second was about 15 days ago when an Indian Airlines Delhi-Srinagar flight had to be offloaded after the pilot sounded a false hijack alert.
