Scare for PM's plane minutes before landing

LANDED SAFELY: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was returning from Jamshedpur.

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Keywords: Radar, Flights

New Delhi: A plane carrying Prime Minister Manmohan Singh got a security scare on Tuesday evening when an unidentified object was spotted flying close to it.

Singh was returning from Jamshedpur when Delhi’s air traffic control (ATC) picked up an unidentified blip on its radar. The blip could have been an unidentified aircraft.

The Prime Minister’s aircraft was aligned to the instrument landing system—a system which aids planes to land—of the runway at the Delhi International aircraft when ATC picked up the blip.

Fearing for security, the plane was disengaged from the instrument landing system to take evasive action from the unidentified object. Sources at the Delhi ATC though say that the blip could have been a radar malfunction.

The plane was delayed by 16 minutes.

This was the second security scare for the PM’s aircraft since December 2007. The pilot and co-pilot of a private airline's helicopter were arrested on December 17 when they landed at a helipad in Bilaspur, Himachal Pradesh, minutes before Singh was about to take off.