DGCA puts in place fresh measures

New Delhi: The met department bitterly complained that its warning of dense fog given well in advance on Saturday evening failed to bring any relief to passengers. Airlines kept them seated inside aircraft waiting to take off for hours and planes headed to Delhi diverted to other places in record numbers.
"Fog descended without any warning on Christmas and led to troubles that could not be avoided. Now we gave advance warning and still passengers ended up suffering," a senior Met official complained at the review meeting held by aviation secretary Nasim Zaidi at the airport on Sunday evening.
The first new rule put in place is that non-CAT III-compliant planes will not be allowed to land or take off from IGI before 10am during fog. Airlines will have to draw up a separate schedule for such flights. "As many as 300 of 415 aircraft with Indian carriers are CAT III-compliant and 2,100 of 4,000 pilots are CAT III-trained. That's a sizeable number and there's no point letting non CAT III-compliant planes be here in fog hours and block other planes too," Zaidi said.
In fact, complaints from passengers started coming from early morning itself and Zaidi decided that the earlier order of not allowing airlines to make passengers board aircraft when visibility is below 125 metres (the minimum in which planes like Boeing 737 and Airbus A-320 can get airborne) needed to be tweaked. To be fair to airlines, they may ask passengers to board planes in visibility but then it may fall and lead to long wait - something beyond their control.
27/12/10 Saurabh Sinha/Times of India

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Categories: Airports Dec 2010