The Air Traffic Controllers’ (ATC) Guild has urged the civil aviation ministry to evaluate the functioning of the Automatic Message Switching System (AMSS) at the Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA) in New Delhi, as well as system upgrades at other major airports across the country.
In a three-page letter submitted to the ministry on Wednesday, the ATC Guild said there is an urgent need to evaluate the “efficiency, accountability and structural logic of Airports Authority of India’s (AAI) Communication, Navigation and Surveillance (CNS) wing”.
Additionally, the guild’s letter also said the automation system under consideration for upgradation at Mumbai, Bangalore, and other metro airports doesn’t seem capable of handling the current heavy traffic load.
“We request to review these system upgrades to handle the traffic load efficiently for safe air traffic services,” it stated.
The State-owned AAI provides air traffic control and CNS services and the AMSS supports air traffic control’s flight planning process.
The demand comes after a technical problem with the AMSS resulted in delays of more than 800 flights and the cancellation of 46 flights at the Delhi airport on Friday.
Also Read: Delhi ATC technical glitch delays over 800 flights
The IGIA is the country’s busiest airport where air traffic controllers handle more than 2,500 aircraft movements daily.
On November 8, Civil Aviation Minister, K Rammohan Naidu, had directed officials to conduct a detailed root-cause analysis of the technical glitch and to put in place backup servers to boost operations.
Flagging serious concerns about the existing structure, the guild said AAI is not only paying for installation and annual maintenance contract of the CNS infrastructure but is also “hugely burdened for maintaining a huge technical staff which seldom rectifies any technical glitch in CNS systems, costing double to AAI”.
Seeking an investigation into the AMSS failure, the guild said the “responsible officials must be held accountable to avoid such technical faults in future, impacting the common passengers at large”.
Offering ways to avert aviation crises in the future, the guild said OEM-backed life-cycle maintenance contracts with Thales, Raytheon, Indra, Honeywell, ECIL, and BEL should be adopted to reduce reliance on internal ANS manpower.
OEM and ANS refer to original equipment manufacturer and air navigation services, respectively.
It cited that the OEM ELDIS Pardubice, a maker of active radar systems with about 250 employees globally, manages hundreds of radar systems across continents, including India, yet, “AAI employs nearly 500-600 CNS personnel just to manage these systems domestically”.
The grouping also called for modernisation and strengthening of “ANS infrastructure with redundancy systems (parallel AMSS, fallback servers, and modern automation tools)”.
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