Obama on radar, AAI hurries to up safety

Just the news of Barack Obama coming to Mumbai has done what the Airports Authority of India could not in two years.
The Rs 8 crore surface movement radars (SMRs), which could not be installed at the Mumbai airport for two years after their arrival from the US in 2009 because the required infrastructure was not in place, will go up now in a few days because the US president is scheduled to land here on November 5.
While the plan was to install two such radars, the ministry is pulling all stops to make sure that at least one is in place when Obama lands.
When Mumbai Mirror contacted P Anil Kumar, general manager, communications and navigation at AAI, he confirmed that “the experts who are supposed to install the SMRs are in town.”
In the 18 months that the two SMRs have been lying in a warehouse, there have been five near-misses between taxiing airplanes at the Mumbai airport which could have been prevented if the Airport Surface Movement Ground Control System (ASMGCS), as the entire project is known, had been implemented.
But then, there was no Obama visit to Mumbai scheduled in these two years. So the AAI did not really care. The SMRs, acquired soon after the 26/11 attacks, help monitor every movement on the airport’s surface, may it be aircraft, vehicles or humans. At an airport as busy as Mumbai, it’s an essential piece of safety equipment.
14/10/10 Mumbai Mirror

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Categories: airports Oct 2010, Safety Oct 2010