The aircraft carrying British Prime Minister David Cameron had just about landed on Wednesday evening at the New Delhi IGI airport when the Autotrack-III air traffic control system and its radar had begun to malfunction.
While ATC officials have already stated earlier that there was no air safety threat to any aircraft in the skies since the other Autotrack-II system was on “hot standby” and “working simultaneously”, the Airports Authority of India — that handles the ATC functions — is now probing the effectiveness of the Autotrack-III system that was undergoing validation trials when the malfunction occurred for 20 minutes.
The Airports Authority of India has asked the private company that has manufactured the Autotrack-III to explain the malfunction. ATCs relied only on the Autotrack-II system on Thursday for air traffic management at the IGI airport. AAI officials said that there would have been no air safety threat even if Mr Cameron’s flight had been over Delhi at the time of the radar malfunction but air traffic controllers are heaving a sigh of relief that the radar malfunction did not take place when a VIP flight was above Delhi airport.
The AAI has already stated that no flight movements were affected at the IGI airport on Wednesday evening despite the radar malfunction since the ATC relied on the Autotrack-II system when the Autotrack-III malfunctioned.
In another development, the AAI is also working on installation of equipment by next year that will aid the “flexible” use of defence airspace by civil aviation aircraft.
According to some estimates, about 35 per cent of airspace over the country is reserved for defence use.
Meanwhile, DIAL officials said on Thursday that airlines and passengers were delighted with the new integrated T-3 but admitted that there were some “teething troubles”.
There was a problem with alignment of one of the aerobridges at the T-3 that resulted in the delay of the flight of a foreign airline while problems with a conveyor belt resulting in faulty handling of baggage for two other flights of foreign airlines. A few flights were delayed from the T-3 on account of “airline-related problems”.