Anjuli Bhargava: The day of the jackal

OUT OF THE BLUE

On October 7, an Air India flight from Chennai to New Delhi had a narrow escape when the pilot managed to avoid a collision with a Jet Airways aircraft while landing. On October 20, a Jet airways flight from Delhi to Mumbai aborted landing when the pilot spotted an international charter aircraft on the runway. On October 23, a Mumbai-Bangalore Kingfisher flight suddenly did an about turn and veered back towards the heavens after spotting another plane at the runway. On November 16, 305 passengers on board a Singapore airlines flight said a silent prayer after the pilot did a go around after he had spotted a business jet on the runway at Mumbai airport.

And then in another bizarre incident on December 13, a dead jackal was spotted on the runway by a Jet Airways pilot. He spotted it in time not to hit it, alerted the airport authorities and the runway was closed for around half an hour.

All these examples, previously published in the country's newspapers, illustrate my point: that the Indian skies appear a lot safer than the ground. In the air, with fly-by- wire technology in place in most aircraft, the pilot can be fast asleep for certain stretches of the flight and nothing, by and large, will go amiss. On the ground however, pilots say, you need to have your wits about you. There's no saying who may come and bang into you, when and at what speed, on the tarmac or worse, on the runway.

A former Air Traffic Controller (ATC) says that he feels that the simultaneous runway operation designed by the Airport Authority of India is a disaster in the waiting. He says the decision to reduce the training hours of ATCs from 120 to 90 wasn't such a great idea either. The practice of the junior-most ATCs being in the control tower "" often not monitored by seniors who are in area and approach (different wings of the ATC operation) "" is perhaps not the wisest of practices either. Stressed ATCs at Delhi say that while 190 ATCs are assigned to the airport, a closer examination of the log books will show that only 70-80 of these do the real job. The rest are busy with administration, support operations and so on. With the increased flights, the control tower, they say, resembles a fish market, so any kind of stressful situation can easily be mishandled.

Compounding the problem is a free run for vehicles plying within the operational area. Many private airlines use Qualis drivers who, especially when they cross from the international to domestic terminal, drive at break-neck speeds of 80 or at times even 100 km an hour (the permissible speed is 15 km an hour). In October, an Air Deccan lady engineer was killed on the tarmac by one such vehicle.

Apron control tends to overlook this over-speeding instead of cancelling the driver's authorisation permit. Drivers have also been known to drive while speaking on their mobile phones; deputy chief minister of Bihar Sushil Modi was hurt in a near-miss on the ground, when his bus driver, despite being busy on his mobile, managed to avert crashing into a Deccan aircraft.

Birds, it appears, are a minor menace. Stray dogs, blue bulls, jackals and even peacocks have been known to surface within the operational premises. Culverts to cross drains on the side roads of the airport house families of jackals, who at the smell of the first rain express their joy by frolicking on the runway and tarmac.

When I asked a senior aviation ministry official why this kind of thing occurred so frequently and who was to blame, his reaction was interesting. He said that he, in fact, wondered why more such incidents didn't take place on a daily basis. He said he stood on the Delhi airport tarmac for over an hour one day (his position allows him to do so) and felt that it was uncannily like the outer Ring Road in Delhi.

A Kingfisher pilot (an Indian and a friend) said that many foreign pilots in India have developed a fear of landing in India (the next time you appear to be in the air longer than you anticipated, take a walk to the cockpit to check what's really causing the delay!). If the ministry of civil aviation, the DGCA, the Airport Authority of India and the ATCs don't collectively get their act together, he feels, India's pilot shortage could soon intensify.

Meanwhile, in this holy mess, hapless passengers and frequent fliers have little clue of the ground reality. To convince passengers that all is well, the DGCA observed and heavily advertised an air safety week from December 10-15. Maybe it's time for a ground safety week next?