Trouble in the Air

New Delhi: If one were a night passenger on any airline flying out of New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International (IGI) Airport in the past week, chances are one would have spent many a nail-biting moment waiting endlessly to board the aircraft.
Thick fog – formed when the ground cools rapidly resulting in condensation, caused primarily by temperatures plummeting to record new lows – has been playing havoc with flight schedules at IGI Airport since the end of December last year.
In the first three days of the New Year, chaos reigned at IGI airport as over 70 domestic flights were delayed by several hours, six cancelled and 17 international services diverted to other cities. No flight could take off or land for eight hours on Jan. 2 as runway visibility fell to 100 metres and general visibility to less than 50 m (optimal is 600 m).
A glitch in cables connected to the Instrument Landing System (ILS), which measures and provides real-time runway visibility data to the Air Traffic Control tower, compounded matters further. This forced airport officials to shut operations for hours, throwing air schedules off kilter.
Last year over 200 flights got cancelled while about 1,000 were delayed at IGI airport for hours due to heavy fog, which threw flight operations into a tailspin from mid-December onwards.
Air passengers flying out of New Delhi suffer each winter due to inclement weather, surely not a matter of pride for a country feted as an "emerging superpower". The IGI has invested millions in upgrading its infrastructure and shelled out a whopping 100 crore rupees (21.877 million dollars) to install the latest ILS alone at the main and new runways for flights to operate glitch- free.
Collectively, airlines, too, have trained 1,323 pilots to use CAT-111 (the most sophisticated ILS that enables aircraft to land in very foggy conditions) at a cumulative cost of 200 crore rupees (43.75 million dollars). Of the 289 aircraft being used for domestic flights, 206 have also been made ILS- compliant.
08/01/10 Neeta Lal/IPS

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Categories: Airports Jan 2010, Indian Aviation- In General Jan 2010