Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Chennai Airport to save 1300 tonnes of air fuel with segregation of ATC handling arrival, departure of aircraft

Chennai:
Chennai Airport would be able to save 1,300 tones of air fuel besides reducing carbon emissions to the tune of 4,000 tonnes per year with segregation of air traffic controllers handling arrival and departure of aircraft.
Sylvester Israel, General Manager Air Traffic Management, Chennai told Express that earlier there was a single air traffic controller who would be handling both departures and arrivals.
This resulted in the airport handling only 29 aircraft per year but with the segregation now there will be a separate air traffic controller handling the departure and another for arrival.
As a result the efficiency of the airport would be increased significantly. “Now a total of 32 aircraft (both arrival and departure) can be handled per hour. We will increase it to 36 aircraft per hour,” he said.
This could save fuel as air traffic controllers can plan landing and departures by spacing between two aircraft.

Similarly, there is a plan to bifurcate the  Oceanic airspace of Chennai which  spans an area of around 4,00,000 Square nautical miles through which around 400 International Overflying aircraft transit daily using the 14 International routes providing the vital connectivity between East and Western parts of the Globe .

He said Airport Authority of India, Chennai, has undertaken the project of Sectorising the Oceanic Airspace on trial basis. The airspace is  split into two sectors after assessing the workload of the controllers, traffic density in each sector , number of  traffic conflict points requiring controllers’ intervention  and the communication or surveillance facilities  available in each sector. 

The project which will be implemented after three  phases  of trial operations  after Regulatory Safety Assessments,  will go a long way  not only in alleviating the workload of controllers but also in improving  operational efficiency of Air Navigation Service in the Oceanic Airspace  and enabling aircraft to obtain their optimum flight profile with enhanced safety .

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