For a country run from a place called Delhi, with its welcoming connotations as a portal to the wonders beyond, the state of major airports in India is nothing short of a scandal. Near-miss incidents, taxi space congestion, fatal accidents on the tarmac, traffic jams at the approach and queues from hell all contribute to the harrowing experience that any brush with an airport typically is. A while ago, an aircraft with Sonia Gandhi aboard came within nose-rubbing distance of another commercial flight. If this can happen with VVIP flights, the safety of ordinary passengers is anybody?s guess. At the heart of the problem is the gap between burgeoning air traffic and the infrastructure that ought to go with it. Currently, some 19 million people fly the Indian skies every year, and this is going up at a staggering five million people per year. Of this growth, 46% has come from non-metro airports, which, while ignored by the national media, are even more severely constrained by infrastructure shortcomings. In smaller places, most landing strips remain exactly that?with an accompanying tin shed for passenger formalities.
What happens beyond the public gaze, by most accounts, is even more shocking. Air traffic control is haphazard by world standards, bedevilled both by poorly trained personnel and creaky old technology. Experts, for example, consider a secondary surveillance radar a must to be able to assess the approach and departure positions of aircraft. Alarmingly, many airports, including Bangalore?s, are not even equipped with this technology. Airlines must share some blame, too, for scrimping on money to train their pilots in Category III systems that allow for fog landing. All put together, foggy airports have no hope of seeing any flights on schedule. It does not help either that no-frill airlines would be less than pleased to cough up more money by way of charges to defray expenses on airport handling systems if they were to be upgraded to levels seen at the best airports abroad. Sure, airport privatisation in Delhi and Mumbai could see major improvements in some time, with better utilisation of resources and more comfortable transit. For now, the fearsome news is that the scene at Indian airports is likely to get worse before it gets better. Red alerts on infrastructure, unlike hijacking threats, are never hoaxes.