The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Faulty radars delay flights

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Dec 24, 2004

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Faulty radars delay flights

By T.S. Shankar

CHENNAI, DEC. 23. Flight delays due to the vagaries of weather especially during winter may be common. But at the Chennai airport, flights were delayed as two vital navigational aids — Air Route Surveillance Radar (ARSR) and Route Surveillance Radar (RSR) — broke down following a "digging operation for the optic fibre cable" providing the two facilities.

As the failure of the systems led to a "bunching of flights", delays occurred, ranging from 10 to 60 minutes over the Chennai airspace. The Chennai Air Traffic Control (ATC) tower authorities had a Herculean task of coordinating the arrivals and departures of widebodied jetliners of both international and domestic carriers.

Confirming the undue delay on account of the non-availability of surveillance radars, the Southern Regional Executive Director of Airports Authority of India (AAI), S.K. Saraswathi, told The Hindu that it was unfortunate that for lack of coordination among the agencies functioning in the operational area of the airport, the airline operators had to face this hardship.

He said an official Notice to Airmen was issued by the AAI informing the airline operators of the non-availability of the radar facility from 2-48 a.m. on Wednesday till 2-25 a.m. on Thursday.

This is the second time that the radars are packing up for the same reason. The AAI, he said, was working out a mechanism to avoid recurrence of such delays on account of "indiscriminate digging operations".

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