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Journalism of Courage
NEW DELHI, Jan 14: With the Air Traffic Controllers ATCs now fully familiarised with the new Raytheon radar system at the Indira Gandhi International Airport at New Delhi, the Airports Authority of India AAI has moved over completely to the new system. Now the AAI will stop the current practice of keeping the old radar on hot standby8217;.
While the ATCs had originally opposed the new Raytheon radar, saying that it was still not perfect, most appear to have adapted to it now, and point to its technical superiority.
To cite just one example, while the earlier radar did not give any physical attributes of a plane height and speed, the new radar does all this automatically.
According to the AAI, the trial run of the new radar has also helped them iron out all glitches. Newspaper reports during the first few days, for example, quoted some ATCs as saying that six planes had disappeared off the radar screen. When this was investigated, it was found that one of the ATCs, probably inadvertently, had pressed a button which made part of the screen disappear. They have supervisors on the tower who are there to ensure that this does not recur.
The ATCs had earlier come under fire for trying to link their demands like wage hike to the switch over to the new Raytheon radar. 8220;We were bing wrongly accused. That is why we thought, okay let them shift to the Raytheon. What we had wanted was to let both, the old and the new system, to continue together for some time. And in case of emergency, we could switch to the old system which on standby,8221; the ATC guild general secretary B Shekhar said.
