Flying Blind

It happens every year. Winter comes around, fog rolls in and airports across northern India are found lacking in almost every department when it comes to handling adverse conditions. The foul-up at New Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport when a critical component of the radar at the air traffic control tower went down and its backup malfunctioned as well is only the latest example. The potential for disaster was huge with a large number of flights in the air, visibility down to 75 metres and air traffic controllers forced to function by noting down critical flight information on slips of paper.
The physical infrastructure for dealing with low visibility conditions is a large part of the problem. After years of delayed and cancelled operations, two runways at Delhi's airport are now equipped with the CAT III-B Instrument Landing System (ILS). This allows flights to land and take off in visibility as low as 50 metres. But it is the only airport in the country to have received the upgrade. Operations continue to be hazardous at other airports, passengers are routinely inconvenienced and financial losses mount. And if one takes Delhi as a test case, installing the system does not seem to have solved the problem. Hundreds of flights have been delayed, diverted or cancelled since its installation because of a slew of other systems malfunctioning, from the lighting on taxiways to the Runway Visual Range measuring machines.
The problem is not confined to airport infrastructure. After several delays in upgrading their fleet to be CAT III compatible and training their pilots in the use of the system because of the financial costs involved, this year was supposed to be different with both having been mostly carried out.
18/01/10 Times of India

To Read the News in full at Source, Click the Headline

Categories: Airports Jan 2010