Mr Ramalingam's five fingers

By all accounts, the opening up of the skies by the NDA government, vigorously pursued by the UPA, has paid off.

While the number of aircraft already plying the skies domestically has gone up by around 10 per cent in the last one year to around 185 at present (and is projected to touch 500 by the end of the decade), the number of passengers has risen even faster thanks to the sharp fall in ticket costs with the arrival of the no-frills airlines—according to a news story by a former colleague in The Indian Express, while there were 542,577 passengers in January 2004, the number grew to 695,806 in January 2005 (that’s a growth of over 28 per cent).

This would probably have grown even more because the summer rush has just about begun and more airlines appear to be setting up shop every other day.

Sadly, though, the flying experience has deteriorated beyond belief as infrastructure development has simply not kept pace.

Having to circle around for 15-20 minutes before getting permission to land in Delhi and Mumbai is routine nowadays and, according to the Express piece, while terminal 1B at Delhi (used by the private airlines) can handle 600 passengers an hour, it is currently handling over three times that amount.

The government has plans to fix this, but even if the plans work out on schedule, the best they will be able to do is to cater to the increase in flights, and the basic backlog will remain till a year or two after the airports at Delhi and Mumbai are privatised—indeed, in the case of Mumbai, the problem will get resolved only when a new airport is built, because the existing one simply does not have enough land to build the new runway it so desperately needs.

The capacity of the departure lounge of terminal 1B in Mumbai is being increased by around 50 per cent and will be ready in the next ten days (Delhi’s expansion is on hold till the new private firm takes over).

Twenty new parking bays and three new high- speed taxiways (that allow planes to simply glide into sidelanes within seconds of landing instead of blocking the runway) will be ready in Mumbai within the next 4-5 months, and work on Delhi’s taxiways will begin once the monsoons are over (the tendering has begun).

A group of experts is also examining what can be done to ensure the air traffic control (ATC) doesn’t snap, since you can have all the capacity in the world, but if planes don’t land and take off at, let’s say, once every one to one-and-a-half minutes, there’s bound to be a jam in the sky.

While Delhi has some additional security problems (post the Parliament attack), which force planes to hold themselves at least 25 nautical miles away if they don’t get landing permission, if all goes on schedule, the plan is to reduce the mandatory horizontal and vertical distance between planes taking off and landing.

All told, once this is all done, the two airports will each be able to handle around 35 planes an hour as compared to around 28 now (global standards are around 50-60).

Since the increased capacity will just about cater to the increased demand, and will not make a dent in the current backlog, the jam in the sky will continue for the next couple of years at least.

(One of the first things the new private firm that will run the Delhi airport will be mandated to do is to build a second runway, but the Mumbai airport has no space for a second one—while there is a proposal to relocate some structures, like Air-India’s hangars, and build a truncated runway in Mumbai, Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel has just examined a site for a new airport in Mumbai, and some aeronautical studies are now being conducted to ascertain its suitability.

The party which wins the bid for the operation of the existing airport at Mumbai will have the right of first refusal to build/operate the new airport.)

The problem, however, is that the body which has to do all this, the Airports Authority of India (AAI), is having serious manpower problems, and this is where the five fingers of K Ramalingam, its hapless chief, come in.

Starting from the thumb to the little finger of his hand, these fingers represent the Member Personnel & Administration, Member Operations, Member Planning, AAI’s Chief Vigilance Officer, and Chairman AAI!

That’s right, all through the critical period when India’s flying capacity and demand have grown the way they have, the AAI has a virtually non-existent board—the only other member today is V D V Prasad Rao, who handles finance.

There was briefly a member in charge of personnel (P S Nair), but he left the job within a short period of joining after a controversy over the Public Enterprise Selection Board (PESB) lowering certain qualifying criteria before his selection (the official reason is that Nair’s wife is not well).

What is especially interesting about the critical jobs of operations and planning (these are the people whose main function is to ensure the airports have enough capacity and to plan for the future) is that interviews for two posts were held in September last year, a short list was prepared by the PESB in October, yet the appointments have not been made.

The list was sent to the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet (ACC) and when it came back, the top candidate for the job of the member planning was accepted, but in the case of the other post (operations), the ACC said the candidate who was second on the list should be made the first.

Since this was obviously not acceptable, the ministry of civil aviation did not appoint the planning member either, and now plans to ask the ACC as to why it wants a change in the case of the operations post.

In which case, expect another delay of a month or more. The civil aviation minister’s pet project, to have an Advanced Surface Detector Radar in place in Delhi by winter, to allow ATCs to know if the runway is clear during dense fog, has also taken a beating, and at best, we can hope to get deliveries by the end of the year, installing and testing are another matter altogether.

Expect the jams in the sky to get thicker.