Jam in air gets no space in revamp

The skies over Calcutta are becoming as congested, and probably just as unsafe, as its roads.
Multiple flights on one route, skeletal infrastructure and an obsolete airspace management plan have combined to bring down the safety level of air travel to and from the city by several notches, experts say.
It’s not that the civil aviation ministry is not spending money on modernisation. As much as Rs 2,000 crore has been set aside for Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose International Airport, but most of it is for passenger amenities on the ground rather than technology for safer skies.
An airspace management committee set up by the Airports Authority of India did compile a to-do list three months ago, but there has been no official word on implementing the plans.
Pilots and Air Traffic Control (ATC) officials have long been asking for demarcation of air corridors for busy routes like Delhi, Mumbai and the Northeast. Flights on these routes are often forced to wait long for take-off or hover over the airport for permission to land.
“Separate arrival and departure corridors are immediately required for certain routes. High traffic increases safety hassles, like aircraft coming dangerously close to each other or mistakes in calculating climbing and descending levels of two aircraft,” an ATC official said.
Calcutta is the only metro where one-way air corridors have not been demarcated.
02/06/08 Sanjay Mandal/The Telegraph

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Categories: Airports May 2008, Safety May 2008