NEW DELHI: Reacting to a TOI story on water-laden aviation turbine fuel (
ATF
) forcing some flights to return to Kolkata soon after take off on July 7, India's largest oil marketing company -Indian Oil Corp Ltd (IOCL) -has said that a private oil company had supplied the “contaminated“ fuel to the aircraft. “In fact after the incident, the airline had requested
IndianOil to refuel,“ said Sanjay Tripathi, GM (corporate communications) of
IOCL.
TOI had on July 14 reported that at least two domestic flights had to return to Kolkata soon after take off following a “fuel warning“ on July 7 and that after landing the ATF supplied to them was checked and found to have water contamination. The story clearly said that “after this discovery, the airline took ATF from a large OMC at Kolkata's Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport instead of its regular and relatively small OMC there. And then the flights took off again.“
“In the report, the correspondent has not mentioned the name of the fuel supplier.However, by quoting the name of IndianOil in the later part of the report, it appears that IndianOil has supplied the contaminated fuel to the mentioned airline... In this regard, we wish to mention that IndianOil has not provided fuel to the subject airline.Rather, the contaminated fuel was supplied by a private oil company.... In fact after the incident, the airline has requested IndianOil to refuel their aircraft,“ Tripathi says.
As mentioned by IOCL itself, the TOI report did not say the contaminated ATF was supplied by IndianOil. The report only quoted from IOCL website how it, as India's largest ATF supplier, ensures quality control on the jet fuel supplied to aircraft.