Air crash sparks safety fear in India

Air crash sparks safety fear in India

By Nelson Graves

NEW DELHI (Reuter): The world's deadliest mid-air collision has trained an unforgiving spotlight on flight safety in India, where economic growth has spurred travel but also burdened outdated security controls.

A court of inquiry has been given three months to investigate last week's fiery collision between a Saudi jumbo jet and a Kazakh cargo plane in which 349 people died.

But experts were quick to criticize the nation's air traffic control system even though initial evidence suggests the collision may have stemmed from a tragic pilot error.

"Behind the Times," said a headline in India Today magazine over an article criticizing "obsolete" air traffic control equipment at New Delhi's international airport.

Citing a report by the International Air Passengers Association, the Times of India said the nation has one of the worst safety records in the world.

"We are observing international standards of air safety," Civil Aviation Minister C.M. Ibrahim said.

But the Indian Commercial Pilots' Association said existing navigation and communication systems were not yet up to global standards and unable to cope with increased traffic.

"Some things need doing irrespective of who is to blame," S.S. Sidhu, former secretary-general of the International Civil Aviation Organization, told Reuters.

Propelled by increased business and tourism following free- market reforms started in 1991, more and more passengers are landing and taking off at Indian airports.

Sidhu said the number of domestic passengers is increasing by between 11 and 12 percent a year, while the number of international travelers is growing by 7 percent. That has badly taxed the airport infrastructure, he said.

A multi-million-dollar plan to modernize radar and communications systems at major airports has fallen well behind schedule, authorities said.

Due to be operational six months ago, a state-of-the-art air traffic control system built by Raytheon Co of the United States has been held up by technical glitches.

Last month the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), consultants to the Indian government on the project, refused to certify the $92 million Raytheon system, which is also being installed in Bombay, Indian and U.S. officials said.

The system includes a Secondary Surveillance Radar (SSR) which allows air traffic controllers to establish the altitude of a plane as well as its direction and distance.

Such a three-dimensional image could have given controllers in Delhi the information they needed to warn the Saudi and Kazakh planes that they were headed towards disaster. Officials said the system was now expected to be on line in early 1997.

But Sidhu said other steps were urgently needed. He cited the need for a new air traffic control tower in Delhi, construction of high-speed parallel taxi ways to ease runway traffic and a computerized flight data processing system.

He said the Directorate-General of Civil Aviation needed "more teeth" to discipline erring pilots, and the nation needed a transport safety board to promote safety awareness.

Over the longer term, Delhi needs to double its annual capacity to six million travelers from three million, he said. "My message is, 'Please expedite it. Do it as if it was yesterday. Go all out,'" he said.

Ten senior pilots on a safety panel have recommended two separate air lanes for climbing and descending aircraft. Delhi currently has only one corridor for all aircraft.

A.K. Bhardwaj, assistant general secretary of the Air Traffic Controllers' Guild, told Reuters that Delhi's Very High Frequency communications system was not dependable. "It frequently fails. At times we lose contact with planes," he said.

Some foreign pilots' language skills in English -- the vernacular of international aviation -- were poor, he said.

"Every day we face difficulties with CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) countries," he said.

"The controller has to repeat the same instruction three, four, five, six times. We are getting a lot of problems," he said, adding that the same was true to some extent with Japanese and Korean pilots.