Fog catches upgraded IGI on wrong foot

New Delhi: The dreaded north Indian fog makes travel by road, rail or air a huge uncertainty in the Christmas season for millions. This year was supposed to be different. Delhi , we were told, would no longer be an inaccessible island for fliers this foggy season . The much-touted Instrument Landing System (ILS) would ensure that people could fly in and out of IGI Airport unless visibility dropped really low. But hopes crashed last Saturday when ILS failed to take off as visibility dropped.
What shocks fliers most is that IGI boasts of having spent almost Rs 100 crore on the latest ILS that has been installed on both the main and new runways to enable flights to operate from Delhi till visibility is down to below 50 metres. Airlines too trained 1,323 pilots to use CAT-III (category 3 in the ILS) at a collective cost of over Rs 200 crore. Of the 289 aircraft being used for domestic flights, 206 have got the ILS. Though both the airport operator and airlines recover these expenses from travellers, the latter invariably get grounded.
Take the case of Kalkajibased Ananya Banerjee. The 18-year-old engineering student was booked to travel on Bhubaneswar Rajdhani at 5.20pm last Saturday to Jamshedpur. ‘‘ At 3am on Sunday , we found that the train had been cancelled. Somehow, we managed to get an airline ticket for Kolkata at 2.30pm on Sunday. This flight was also cancelled due to a huge backlog of flights,’’ she said. With no seat available on any Kolkata-bound flight that day, she finally went to Mumbai and from there she flew to Kolkata from where she travelled to Jamshedpur.
07/01/10 Economic Times

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

Categories: Airports Jan 2010