Foggy skies and minds

With winter barely setting in, horror stories of interminable flight delays and planes not being able to land in the capital are already the subject of daily conversation and news reporting.

Another two months of this and the authorities will have made themselves very unpopular indeed.

The crux of the problem remains what it was a decade ago: the country's aviation infrastructure is not just inadequate, and even the limited resources are sub-optimally managed.

A decade ago, the travelling public was told the problem was the delay in procuring, and then installing, suitable Cat II and Cat III radars at major fog-affected airports like Delhi, so as to allow pilots to land and take off even with limited visibility.

Today the radars are in place, but it turns out the pilots are not. While the private airlines have hardly any Cat III-Bravo certified pilots (who can land in 100-150 metre visibility), Indian Airlines is better only by comparison, with around 5 per cent of its pilots trained on Cat III-Bravo systems, and about a third on Cat II systems. Perhaps it's a matter of economics.

The airlines defend this record by arguing that the government has hit them badly by charging double the international rates for fuel and forcing them to fly on a large number of uneconomic routes, and therefore they do not have the money to invest in training pilots for a problem that lasts just a few weeks of the year.

This is of course to misread the situation; the losses in terms of delayed and cancelled flights must certainly be more than what is required to train pilots.

Indeed, if this is the attitude of the private airlines, then it is an opportunity for Indian Airlines to show how it cares more for passenger convenience.

It should be obvious to any airline that punctuality comes only after safety in any passenger's list of priorities and it is unconscionable on the part of airlines to deliberately under-equip themselves to meet this expectation.

The infrastructure needs, however serious, are just one part of the problem. The other issue is of management. Flying aircraft on a Cat III-Bravo basis, for instance, requires that the planes be parked in special bays the night before the fog, bays that have indicator lights, for instance.

But the Delhi airport does not have more than a handful of such bays, though presumably the expense involved wouldn't be too much in comparison with the costs of the radar and other systems.

It doesn't help that air traffic control has its own restrictions on the number of aircraft it will clear in foggy weather""this in turn reinforces the airlines' reluctance to train more pilots to fly in poor visibility conditions.