TWO IndiGo pilots in India have been grounded for mistaking a road for a runway and attempting to land on it, the airline and local media reported.

The blunder, which took place in the city of Jaipur on February 27, saw the pilots pulling the plane up barely a few hundred feet from the ground when alarms started going off.

According to the Hindustan Times, the plane was hardly 900 feet away from touchdown, equivalent to just under 1.5 minutes, when the Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System (EGPWS) sounded in the cockpit.

IndiGo said in a statement that the captain in command took precautionary measures immediately and “carried a go-around”. The airline stressed that at no point was safety “compromised” and the flight landed without incident on the correct runway after.

A probe has been ordered into the incident and both pilots have been grounded by the directorate general of civil aviation.

An aviation official was quoted saying in the Hindustan Times: “The pilots mistook the road running parallel to the runway as the runway and aligned with it. This was a very serious incident.”

IndiGo is India’s leading low-cost airline, commanding nearly 40 percent of its home market, which makes it owner of the biggest shareholder of any airline in the country and also the country’s only consistently profitable airline.

However, it did not obtain a ranking on the Jet Airliner Crash Data Evaluation Center (JACDEC) 2016 report. The Indian airlines that did, namely Jet Airways and Air India, were ranked at 35th and 39th place respectively out of 60 airlines globally.

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Source: travelwireasia.com