Can Indian airports handle rain?

Chennai: Runway safety is particularly important in conditions like heavy rain or fog that many Indian airports will have to deal with in the coming months. The poor state of Indian runways has led to an increasing number of overrun incidents in recent years, according to senior Chennai-based pilot Capt. A. Ranganathan, who has more than 19,000 hours’ flying experience and has worked extensively on wet runway accident studies as well as on the Approach and Landing Accident Reduction (ALAR) project for the Directorate-General of Civil Aviation (DGCA). “In some airports, braking action is extremely poor,” he says. “It is slippery and aircraft are very difficult to control, so as pilots we get annoyed when we see highly inflated figures [reflecting the state of the runway.”
Accidents can occur when pilots deviate from regular landing procedures as they try to compensate for a poor runway. This also leads to pilots developing irregular landing habits. “What happens is pilots start landing short or touching down early,” Capt. Ranganathan says. “People are trying to use the entire length of the runway, and it is easy to misjudge that in bad weather when visibility is poor.”
These dangers have been re-emphasised within the industry by a December 12 report in the Transportation Safety Board (TSB) in Canada investigating the 2005 crash of an Air France Airbus A340 in Toronto. The aircraft overran the runway as it landed in a heavy rain storm — and on a runway that was up to international standards. The investigation showed that the flight crew did not account for a “margin for error” when landing in a heavy rain storm. The report recommends that pilots need to be provided with information about landing distances in different conditions, which many are unaware of.
23/12/07 The Hindu

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Categories: Airports Dec 2007, Safety Dec 2007