Flying into Chennai on a wing - and a prayer

Chennai: Flight safety over Chennai's airspace is increasingly becoming a cause for concern. Struggling with outdated equipment, badly understaffed, air traffic controllers are a harried lot.
At a time when aviation depends on pinpoint measurements, the 122 air traffic controllers here keep chart papers and pencils beside their monitors, because the ageing radar and slow computers force them to often depend on manual calculations.
When radars do not function, ATCs manually calculate the speed and path of an incoming aircraft based on information given by pilots. But pilots often struggle to get a slot to transmit information to ATC when they fly into Chennai Flight Information Region.
It gets worse. The transmissometer, which measures runway visual range (RVR), is out of order. The Monopulse Secondary Surveillance Radar - a highly accurate radar that can be used as stand-alone equipment or can be linked to primary radar - was installed more than 10 years ago. It is still in use.
Sources said the radar breaks down often, wiping out the blips from the ATC screens and making the controllers scurry for pencil and paper to do their calculations based on the data relayed by the pilots.
14/04/08 V Ayyappan/Times of India

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Categories: Airports Apr 2008, Safety Apr 2008