Revision as of 09:18, 8 March 2014

Small airports: Poor visibility

The Times of India

Poor visibility at small airports a worry

V Ayyappan | TNN

Chennai: Though visibility is a crucial factor for pilots to make a safe landing, most of the small airports in the south do not have modern equipment to measure runway visibility and feed it to the air traffic control system.

With rains round the corner in the west coast, accurate information about the extent of visibility at airports in Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi, Kozhikode, Mangalore and Coimbatore is vital for pilots.

At the Chennai airport that handles up to 400 flights every day, there is only one transmissometer — used to gauge runway visibility range (RVR) — installed near the touchdown point at the Pallavaram end of the main (07) runway. The other end of the runway does not have the equipment.

‘‘A transmissometer would have helped the pilot of the ill-fated Air India Express flight at Mangalore. Readings of dew point and temperatures were indicating that air was less dense, which means the aircraft may have needed more landing run, said V Krishnan, a former office-bearer of Air Traffic Controllers Guild.

International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) recommends RVR for runways served by Instrument Landing System (ILS). And almost all airports have ILS, still they do not have transmissometers, he added.

The meteorological department has chosen to install the equipment at airports where they have a forecasting office instead of looking at the requirement of pilots. Here too, only one end of the runway has transmissometers.

When transmissometers are not installed, the Met department issue does a manual calculation by measuring the lowest distance from where an object could be spotted at a 360 degree angle.

Though plans to install more such transmissometres were drawn up two years ago, fund crunch had slowed down the installation. Met department hopes that the Mangalore disaster would speed up the process.