Friday, September 02, 2011

New radar for Kochi airport in 6 months

KOCHI: Cochin International Airport Limited (CIAL) will have a new airport surveillance radar (ASR) within six months, airport director ACK Nair told TOI on Friday.

The new radar system will make it possible to reduce the holding time of the aircraft before landing from the present level of 12 minutes to three minutes. "This means that we can have four aircraft landed within 12 minutes whereas it will take about 40 minutes for this currently," he said. "We can also have more accurate alignment tracking for landing of the aircraft," Nair said.

The proposal for installing an ASR at Cochin airport has been mooted long back. "It is the Airport Authority of India which has to install the radar system. We have to provide only the building and other facilities for it. We are on the job already. The radars will be installed near the runway. There were some legal issues in the tendering process for it. Now we have been told those issues have been sorted out. Normally it takes about six months' time for the delivery of the radar," he said. The radar at Cochin airport will be networked with the systems at the Mangalore, Chennai and Thiruvananthapuram airports.

An airport spokesman said the radar is expected to cost about Rs 25 lakh and it will be imported from France.

Nair said the friction levels in the airport runway will be tested next week. "These tests have to done every four months, to maintain the runway as per the international standards. Last time we tested the runway was in June. The global norms mandate that the runway should have a minimum friction coefficient of three whereas the Cochin airport was found to have coefficient value of seven. This meant that we were maintaining the runway at minimum friction levels. But we have to maintain this quality through regular inspections and adopting appropriate correction measures," he said.

The airport spokesman clarified that the friction level inspection had very little to do with the recent skidding off of the Gulf Air aircraft. "This is a routine inspection. The probe team from the director general of civil aviation (DGCA) has already clarified that aircraft had skidded off the runway because of the pilot's error. It had nothing do with the friction level of the ariport runway."

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