Calcutta main runway too busy for repairs

Calcutta: Calcutta airport’s main runway is making do with patchwork instead of the mandatory 24 hours of maintenance a month because the departments supposed to keep it in shape do not co-ordinate well.
When a crater was detected near taxiway C last week, Air Traffic Control (ATC) allegedly did not stop operations immediately. By the time the runway was closed for an hour and repaired, several aircraft had passed through the stretch where a large chunk of concrete had come off.
“The crater was spotted in the morning and ATC officials were asked to use the secondary runway. But they refused to immediately hand over the runway for maintenance,” a senior official of the Airports Authority of India (AAI) said on Sunday.
The ATC had cited bad weather and low visibility as the reason for not using the secondary runway, which does not have an instrument landing system.
“On the secondary runway, flights can operate during the day when the minimum visibility is 3,600 metres. But visibility is much less during the monsoon. We had no option but to continue using the main runway,” an ATC official said.
04/08/08 Sanjay Mandal/The Telegraph

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Categories: Airports Aug 2008