MUMBAI: In New York's La Guardia airport, the old air traffic control tower is being demolished for the new. London's Heathrow is demolishing and reconstructing its Terminal 2. At Sydney airport, work on the safety area being built at the end of a runway is almost complete. Closer home, in Mumbai, work is on to construct an integrated terminal, an air traffic control tower and several other airport essentials.
"With the ever-increasing volume of air traffic, there are hardly any airports in the world that are not under construction," said Capt Daniel Maurino, safety advisor, International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO). He is in the city to conduct a week-long training session on ICAO's Safety Management System (SMS) for officials handling airport operations. To put it simply, SMS is about adopting a proactive approach to prevent accidents in an airport. "Even in the best-run organization in the world, there is room for improvement. It's very healthy to be sceptical in air safety,'' he said, lauding Mumbai airport operator's decision to voluntarily hold this training session. Unlike in the case of Mumbai airport, generally airports request such ICAO training sessions only before an audit or check, he said. So, in the next few days, the participants will be trained in the culture of anticipating what could go wrong at an airport from the safety point of view and the remedies.
From 2006 to 2010, ICAO conducted about 250 SMS training sessions the world over. And, often in such training sessions, air safety concerns because of construction activities at an airport come up. "An airport under construction is constantly altering its geography, its system," said Capt Maurino. "There is growing awareness about the hazards that construction brings along - contractors with no knowledge of airports, vehicles that are alien to airport operations, moving from old system to new. Construction has become one of the topmost safety concerns in airports all over the world."
In the past four to five years, an ever-increasing global air traffic has created a new mantra - if it's an airport, it has to be under construction.
In the past few years, in India, two incidents occurred at airports under construction, although both were a result of pilot error. In November 2009, Kingfisher Airlines ATR aircraft overshot runway 27, which was temporarily shortened to accommodate repairs. In June 2007, SpiceJet Boeing 737 aircraft landed on the wrong runway, which was closed for repairs.
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