IndiGo aircraft’s belly scrapes runway again; plane grounded

An IndiGo Airbus A321’s fuselage scraped the runway during landing at Gorakhpur earlier this week, according to industry sources, marking at least the 8th tail-strike incident involving the airline’s A321 fleet.

The aircraft has remained grounded since the incident, which came to light in Gorakhpur on August 19. Its last recorded operation was a Delhi–Gorakhpur flight.

The aircraft involved was an Airbus A321neo. According to industry sources, this is at least the 10th tail-strike incident involving an IndiGo aircraft since 2023, with at least eight of these incidents involving A321s. One incident involved the smaller-sized, regional aircraft, an ATR, and another an A320. There is no official data available on the number of tail-strike incidents involving the airline.

The airline said the aircraft aborted a landing, and made a landing on second attempt on August 19 while arriving in Gorakhpur from Delhi. It was subsequently grounded after “scratches were found around the inlet of the auxiliary power unit (APU)”, located at the rear of the aircraft.

The A321 is particularly susceptible to tail strikes because of its longer fuselage and pilots have demanded that a thorough probe would help suggest corrective action to be taken to prevent future such incidents.

The Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) took over the investigation into an IndiGo A321 tail strike in September 2024 after extensive damage to the underbelly of the aircraft after it scraped the runway in Delhi, landed there, went unnoticed and took off for Bengaluru. After the same aircraft was involved in another tail strike on March 8, 2025 just days after undergoing repairs, being made airworthy and return to flight services, the AAIB told The Hindu that it was launching a comprehensive probe into all IndiGo A321 tail-strike incidents. However, no findings from the probe have been made public so far, nor have reports been published on the airline’s earlier tail-strike incidents. In January 2024, DGCA imposed a penalty of ₹30 lakh on IndiGo related to the tail strikes after an audit found “systemic deficiencies” in “operations, training and engineering procedures”, according to a DGCA statement.

Earlier this year, Airbus revised its Flight Crew Training Manual to prescribe initiating the landing flare ( the nose-up pitching manoeuvre performed just before touchdown ) at 40 feet for the A321, compared with 30 feet for other aircraft in the family, including the A318, A319 and A320. IndiGo is Airbus’s largest customer globally.