New `bird` in sky to help reduce flight time

New Delhi: By 2010, a flight from Delhi to Chennai could take just two hours, a full 45 minutes less than the current duration. And a Mumbai-Delhi flight could be only an hour.
This anticipated saving in time and money (in terms of fuel costs and airport charges for carriers) will be possible with the launch of GAGAN, or the satellite-aided geo-augmented navigation project being jointly implemented by the Airports Authority of India (AAI) and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).
A Rs 644-crore project to implant navigation software in existing satellites, GAGAN, which is currently undergoing feasibility tests, will do away with the need for aircraft to be navigated through ground navigation stations, which now send position signals to the aircraft.
When the project is implemented, the signals will come from the satellite to reference stations across the country, get corrected by them and uplinked to the satellite, which will then transfer the accurate signals to the aircraft. Apart from accuracy in position, the aircraft will be able to plot its way through much shorter routes.
In the current system, routes are determined by the location of the ground stations or aids, which are usually 150 km apart. So a Delhi-Chennai flight currently takes a zig-zag route over Farukhabad-Secundrabad-Banaras-Bhopal-Nagpur-Hyderabad-Chennai.
In time, the 80 air control towers across the country will be replaced with eight reference stations at Delhi, Kolkata, Guwahati, Port Blair, Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Jammu and Thiruvananthapuram, with a master control centre in Bangalore. Later, eight more stations and two more control centres might be set up in Bangalore and Delhi.
19/07/07 Anirban Chowdhury/Business Standard

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Categories: Airports Jul 2007, New Jul 2007, Safety Jun 2007