Runway Lights in Italy Turned Off as Jetliner Approached to Land
Transportation officials said Friday they would investigate why airport workers in Reggio Calabria turned off the runway lights and closed the airport for the night as a jetliner with 103 people aboard approached for a landing.
The domestic airline ATI, a subsidiary of Alitalia, said the DC-9 was 60 seconds from touching down Wednesday when the control tower broke radio contact and the lights went out. Officials said the pilot quickly gained altitude and flew 100 miles to Lamezia Terme.
“In no part of the world is an airplane authorized to approach and then be abandoned at the moment of landing,” Ettore Grion, deputy operations director of ATI, told the AGI news agency.
According to newspaper accounts, the jet left Rome 3 1/2 hours late Tuesday night because of air traffic congestion. As it approached Reggio Calabria, in southern Italy, the tower radioed that the airport closed at 1 a.m. and that the pilot had 11 minutes to land.
“They told us they wouldn’t wait a second longer. At 1 a.m. they shut down,” the Communist Party newspaper L’Unita quoted the pilot as saying.
Newspaper accounts said the pilot tried to make the landing on time, but at 1 a.m. exactly the runway went dark.
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