F
light 9I613 came in from Delhi and landed in Bilaspur right around 11 am on Friday. Ordinary approach, nothing anyone on the ground flagged beforehand. Then the left tyre punctured on touchdown and an ordinary Friday landing turned into a runway evacuation.
No fire. No skid off the tarmac. Just a burst tyre and, for a few minutes, a plane full of people who needed to get off the aircraft without really knowing yet how bad the situation was.
It wasn't bad, in the end. All 37 passengers and all four crew members got out fine and were walked across from the runway to the terminal building. Forty-one people total, zero injuries, and that's the number that's been repeated in basically every report on this since Friday morning.
Could've gone worse. Didn't.
A punctured tyre on landing rollout is, honestly, one of the more forgiving failures a flight crew deals with, so long as the plane holds its line and doesn't veer off the runway. That's more or less what happened here the ATR 72 stayed put on the paved surface, which is probably the only reason this stayed a local story and not a bigger one.
Still, a damaged tyre grounds an aircraft. You can't tow it off and put it back in the air an hour later like nothing happened. Somebody has to actually inspect it, sign off on whether it's fit to fly, and at an airport the size of Bilaspur's, that eats hours nobody had budgeted for. That's the reason Alliance Air pulled the plane's next scheduled departure.
What actually caused the puncture, nobody's said. Runway debris, worn tyre tread, a hard touch on landing take your pick, because officials haven't. All they've offered is that further details are awaited, which is the kind of line airport officials give when they genuinely don't know yet, not when they're hiding something.
Here's the thing about Bilaspur specifically.
Bilasa Devi Kevat Airport only started taking commercial flights in March 2021, opened up under the UDAN regional connectivity scheme. Alliance Air flew the first flight in, from Delhi via Jabalpur, and it's been the only carrier operating there ever since. Not the main carrier. The only one.
That arrangement hasn't exactly been solid lately either. Earlier this year Alliance Air's summer schedule for the city came out without a single new route added to it, and it dropped the Prayagraj connection that already existed. A local group had been pushing the airline for more service. What they got was less.
The mechanics of why aren't complicated, if you've followed regional aviation in India at all. Spotty service scares off the regular flyers and the corporate travel accounts, load factors drop, the route stops making financial sense, so it gets cut further and around it goes again. Somebody has to break that loop, either a second airline showing up or Alliance Air doubling down with real backing, and right now neither one looks likely.
Which is exactly why a tyre burst that ended without a scratch on anyone still hits harder here than it would in a city with five carriers and a spare aircraft sitting on standby. Delhi shrugs this off. Bilaspur can't, not really one operator, one grounded plane, and every connected flight that day feels it.
Nationally, this isn't some tiny outfit running on fumes, even though its Bilaspur operation looks fragile up close. Alliance Air runs more than 80 departures a day to 55 destinations, flying out of hubs in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad. Almost the entire fleet is turboprops ATR 72-600s, ATR 42-600s, a few Dornier 228s built for short regional hops, not long hauls.
It's also carrying a bit of symbolic weight it didn't ask for. Alliance Air flew the very first UDAN flight back in 2017, Shimla to Delhi, and has more or less been treated as the scheme's flagship carrier since. Which is exactly why something as small as a tyre burst in Bilaspur doesn't stay small in the conversation. It becomes one more line in a much longer story about whether regional air connectivity in India is actually delivering what it promised, or just limping along on good intentions.
For now, though, none of that changes what actually happened on the ground Friday. A tyre burst, an evacuation that went the way it's supposed to, and 41 people who landed a little rattled but completely fine.
Alliance Air flight 9I613 from Delhi suffered a tyre burst while landing at Bilaspur's Bilasa Devi Kevat Airport on August 28, 2026. All 37 passengers and four crew aboard the ATR 72 got off safely, walked to the terminal, no injuries. The onward flight from Bilaspur got scrapped, and as of Friday afternoon nobody's said what actually caused the tyre to go.
