Govt sets new target for Raytheon radar

The bad news, however, is that in the past six months alone, AAI has been forced to put off its Delhi launch thrice, with the ATCs unwilling to move to the new system, primarily because they want another steep hike in allowances for doing so. And, due to failures on both AAI as well as Raytheon’s part, the commissioning is alreadydelayed by over two years. Had the Delhi radar, with its secondary surveillance system been operational on schedule in October 1996, for instance, the horrible mid-air collision of the Saudi and Kazakh aircraft in which 351 people were killed near Delhi on November 12, 1996, would not have taken place.

While the AAI is non-committal about the negotiations it is having with the ATCs, sources say the ATCs are asking for very steep increases in their allowances, and are unlikely to start operations till these are agreed to — a year ago, a 19-day strike by the ATCs resulted in nearly a doubling of their salaries. What’s worse, while the government had begun training Air Force officers on the new radars as a fallback option, they gave up on this plan soon after the last strike ended.

The current demand of the ATCs is that the equipment has one earphone — the old equipment has two earphones, one for conversation with the pilots and one for internal ATC conversation. AAI sources say this is merely a bargainingploy, as nowhere in the world are two earphones used.

Earlier, the ATCs put off moving to the Raytheon system, saying that it forced them to study two screens at the same time as against just one in the old system — the fact, however, is that in the old system they had to continually refer to manuals at the same time. Getting new earphones will cost AAI around $ 1 mn and will delay things by around six months more.

Meanwhile, with the delay in commissioning the new radars, pilots are becoming increasingly critical of the safety standards in Delhi and Mumbai. A few weeks, the International Federation of Airline Pilots Association (IFALPA) downgraded the Delhi and Mumbai airports, saying that safety standards were poor. And, just a month prior to this, IATA carried out a survey of pilots which indicated that pilots felt that the quality of audio instructions from the ATCs was very poor.

The AAI, for its part, dismisses much of the criticism as one based on vested interests. It says, for example, thatIFALPA had no business to downgrade airports without showing its findings to the AAI first — it has written to IFALPA and asked for the report. On the IATA survey, Roby Lal, member operations for AAI, says: “We did a survey in July which showed some problems in the East and South and we’re fixing this. If the IATA survey shows a problem in other areas, why don’t they show us the tapes of the conversations with the pilots and the ATCs?. I’ve asked Tony Lavin, IATA’s Singapore person for this, but haven’t got it — I’ve now written to him for it.”

Aviation experts, however, say that this is just evading the issue. While there is no doubt that some of IFALPA’s criticism — such as that on arrival and departure procedures (Stars and Sids) — is unwarranted, some of the basic issues such as poor audio feed, frequent power failures and occasional radar problems, and poor calibration of radar signals, are genuine.

Besides, they argue, no agency can ever give the tapes which show when the pilots complained ofpoor audio feed — if they do so, this will identify the airline concerned, and then this airline can be blacklisted by the ATCs in the future.

Poor audio feed is a problem which is stated by the pilots in most meetings of the Airline Operators Committee with the AAI.

AAI chief D V Gupta points out that, if you look at critical parameters like availability of the radar for navigation, or bird hits, the AAI scores well. The radar availability, for example, is around 99.3 per cent. Aviation experts, however, point out that this is confusing issues. If, for example, the radar is down for 30 hours, it looks small in percentage terms. However, if this is, as it usually is, at times of dense fog, then the problem is very severe.