Doubts over safety in Calcutts skies

Calcutta: A closer look at the Air Traffic Control (ATC) — that controls aircraft movement from take-off to landing — in Calcutta airport raises serious safety concerns.
“There is a severe problem in communication via the very high frequency in the ATC’s area south, covering the Bay of Bengal. We should be communicating with pilots over an area of 400 nautical miles (740.8 km) south of Calcutta. But very often, we cannot communicate with an aircraft beyond 100 nautical miles (185.2 km),” said an ATC official.
As the ATC officials are forced to repeat a message several times to a pilot, it creates problems for other pilots flying in the same zone. The message often gets transmitted to them as well.
At night, the Calcutta skies have a heavy load of traffic — around 300 aircraft fly over Calcutta between 12.30am and 3.30am every night.
False blipping of radar is the other safety concern. The Calcutta ATC has one approach and three route radar and all the four are more than 10 years old. “We depend on radar to track aircraft movement. False blips confuse the radar controller, as tracking gets difficult,” said an ATC official.
The Centre okayed Rs 200 crore earlier this year for upgrading the surveillance and communication system in Calcutta airport, but the situation has not changed.
The direct speech circuit (DCS) at the Calcutta ATC, which provides hotline communication with Yangon airport, has not been functioning for three months. All aircraft to and from southeast Asia fly between Yangon and Calcutta.
17/12/07 Sanjay Mandal/The Telegraph

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Categories: Airports Dec 2007, Safety Dec 2007