Etawah:
It was a close shave for a plane carrying Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav, when a cyclist suddenly appeared on the runway as his plane was about to land at Etawah airport in Uttar Pradesh on Saturday. Mulayam's plane went past the cycle and missed it by a very small margin.
When Mulayam chose the cycle as his party symbol, he probably never imagined that it might one day end up giving him a serious scare. That too, on his home turf of Saifai.
A narrow escape, not just for this cyclist, but also for Mulayam Singh Yadav and others onboard the plane.
Mulayam's close shave happened at about 11 am on Saturday as he flew in from Delhi. It turns out that the cyclist is an employee of the airport with an aviation job perhaps unique to this airport, to ward off neelgai, which stray onto the runway.
"The Saifai SDM had put me on duty to remove the neelgai, " says Anant Ram Verma, the cyclist. However, SDM Shankar Mukherjee says, "The cyclist shouldn't have been there, but there was no hole in our security."
Commenting on the incident, Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh Yadav says, "The matter is serious, but I had to hold a press conference among you all. The responsibility for the security at the airport lies with the state."
Flight safety, particularly that related to VIPs, assumed prime concern since Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y S Rajasekhara Reddy was killed in a helicopter crash in September last year.
But a number of near mishaps have recurred at airports across the country despite this.
In December, the rotor blades of an Indian Air Force helicopter carrying President Pratibha Patil hit a shed after landing at the airport in Bhubaneswar.
Also in December, a controversy brew when Congress General Secretary Rahul Gandhi denied reports that he forced his helicopter pilots to land in poor visibility conditions at dusk in northern Sitapur in Uttar Pradesh.