It's a miracle planes land safely in India 20 Jul 2007, 0245 hrs IST,Manju V,TNN

 

Patna: 6,411 feet runway. Trees on property belonging to Lalu Prasad�s in-laws appear on the safety funnel of Instrument Landing System during approach (TOI Photo)

MUMBAI: The monsoon this year has caused casualties of a new kind. There have been nine aviation accidents or incidents at various Indian airports in the last three months - most of them caused by that fatal combination of heavy rain and short runways. It was these two factors that caused the Tam Airbus to crash in Sao Paulo on Wednesday, killing 200 people.

Even veteran pilots are known to get the monsoon jitters - flying through heavy rain, cross winds, and an opaque cloud cover is hard enough, but landing in these hostile conditions on a stingy runway that stops short of 9,000 feet is nerve-wracking.

With an additional 12,000 flights this year compared with 2006, the rise in the number of skids and incidents is not surprising. The Sao Paulo tragedy has raised the question: how safe are Indian runways?

The consensus in the aviation industry is that the two most unsafe airports in the country are those at Pune and Patna. However, it's not as if the rest are up to standard.

The fact is that most of India's 200-plus airports have landing strips that fall short of the 9000-foot safety benchmark. During the dry months, this does not really make a difference - after all, thousands of flights arrive safely every day - but come the thundershowers and suddenly the lack of inches is acutely felt.

With so negligible a margin for error, an aircraft can easily overshoot the slippery strip of tarmac. Even the country's so-called long runways aren't up to scratch. Says an A320 check pilot,"In the Emirates Operations Manual, the example of a bad runway is Mumbai airport runway 27."

Singapore Airlines too does not land on Mumbai airport's runway 14 as it has been classified 'sub-standard' because of the air-traffic control tower standing a few metres away. "Runway 14 may be 9,596 feet but it has a displaced threshold, which means only 7,200 feet are available for landing. To make things worse, the end of the runway is waterlogged and slippery," says a senior Boeing 747 commander.

While the Airports Authority of India operates 124 runways, state governments own 158 and private parties 63.