Jam in the sky

While the new airlines taking off and the expansion of the existing ones are feathers in the country’s cap, the problem of increasingly crowded skies has to be addressed quickly. The country’s airports haven’t been upgraded suitably, and circling in the sky for lengthening periods of time before getting permission to land appears to have become the norm.

Thankfully, there have been no accidents or reports of “near misses” (when the vertical distance between two planes is less than the stipulated norm) since the growth in traffic began, but the need to modernise airports and air traffic control systems is critical.

Airports like those in Delhi and Mumbai, for instance, handle just 20-25 aircraft per hour, compared to double that number and more in other countries. If civil aviation is to grow at more than 10 per cent annually (which means doubling traffic in seven years), the air traffic control system will need overhaul. And obviously it is better to start work on this before the system reaches breaking point.

It is tempting to think these issues can be fixed as and when the big airports get privatised—the bids for Delhi and Mumbai will be in by the end of the month—but the country’s air passengers don’t have the luxury of waiting for so long in such a dynamic market.

Increasing the physical handling capacity of the country’s runways may not be a difficult task and can be done pretty soon at airports that have the land. Operational practices too need to change. One of the problems witnessed today is that planes remain on the runway for too long after they have landed; the solution is to build more taxiways to enable the planes to get off the runways as soon as they land, a relatively easy task.

Segregating traffic is another easy-to-implement managerial solution; today, four-seaters land on the same runway as 200-seaters and take as much time on the runway. These small planes should be made to use different airports, which happen to exist in the big metropolises. That will leave air traffic control.

Another area that needs to be looked at is the strength/capability of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) since it is this organisation which certifies planes as airworthy.

The ability of the DGCA to follow up and ensure that regular checks are done, already quite poor, will get further stretched once the number of aircraft doubles, as it will over the next two to three years. In short, the revolution in India’s skies can be sustained only if there is a matching organisational response to the changes required on the ground.