Gaps in radar coverage create blind spots on air routes

Chennai: Near misses as in the case of the Visakhapatnam-Chennai Kingfisher flight and Chennai-Visakhapatnam Jet Airways flight that flew at the same altitude on a collision course have become alarmingly frequent as a result of blind spots in the sky due to inadequate radar coverage.
A blind spot is a stretch on a route where flights often vanish from the monitors of air traffic controllers. Such zones are seen as vulnerable to dangerous situations although all commercial airliners have traffic collision avoidance systems (TCAS) installed onboard to warn pilots of aircraft in the vicinity, say experts.
On Wednesday, the Kingfisher pilot was the first to spot the other aircraft coming towards him at the same level and called Chennai air traffic control which, by then, had also noticed that the two aircraft were at the same altitude. The ATC then instructed the Kingfisher aircraft to climb before the TCAS could sound an alarm.
In June this year, a mid-air collision was similarly averted only after the TCAS sounded a collision warning inside the cockpits of a Chennai- Madurai Air India aircraft and a Thiruvananthapuram-Chennai Jet Airways aircraft. The two were flying through another radar blind spot when the incident happened.
In the absence of radar coverage over such areas, where air traffic goes unmonitored for several kilometres, safety clearly hinges on the collision avoidance system.
The trouble spots in the south are over Madurai and Tiruchi on the Chennai-Thiruvananthapuram route, over Mangalore and Bellary on the Chennai- Mumbai route, over Bangalore and Hyderabad on the Chennai- Delhi route and over the sea 150 miles from Visakhapatnam on the Chennai-Kolkata and Chennai-Visakhapatnam route.
The Chennai-Delhi and Chennai-Mumbai routes are specially problematic because of the presence of Bangalore, Hyderabad and Mangalore airports which tend to increase traffic. Aircraft coming in to land or take off from these airports often intersect the routes. Efficient radar coverage is crucial in these areas, said an official.
18/09/10 V Ayyappan/Times of India

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Categories: airports Sep 2010, Safety Sep 2010