Down the Memory Lane - 'KANISHKA' lecture by Former Deputy Director & Emeritus Scientist

An interesting lecture "Down the Memory Lane - 'KANISHKA'  Revisited" is delivered on 01st July 2010 by Mr. Dr.V.Ramachandran,  Former Deputy Director & Emeritus Scientist, National Aerospace Laboratories, Bangalore at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. It has been organized by Indian Institute of Metals, Bangalore Chapter. The completed session is quite interesting and has been attended by many research scholars and industry experts.

Some of the excerpts are as follows

On June 23, 1985, Boeing 747 aircraft “KANISHKA” of Air India, on a scheduled flight from Montreal to London en route to Delhi and Bombay, suddenly plunged, from an altitude of 31000 feet, into the Atlantic Ocean, at a spot about 110 miles west of Ireland, killing all the 329 occupants on board. It was the worst accident in the history of Indian civil aviation. The investigation of the accident posed many challenges in management, coordination and technical. The speaker, as a Member of the Court of Inquiry investigating this accident, has presented the details of the investigation as he was totally involved in the task. Wreckage was retrieved from the ocean floor using the state-of-the-art technology and examined in detail. It is noteworthy that metallography studies on fragments of the wreckage retrieved from the ocean played an important role in revealing the cause of the accident. As delivered by the speaker, the key focus was on metallurgical failure analysis and how metallography studies helps in knowing the facts behind such a worst civilian aircraft accident.

You can also view quite useful videos part 1 to 5 about this air crash investigation at You tube- Clickhere.