Mumbai:
Hold on to your seats and pray fervently for a safe landing the next time your aircraft prepares to touch down at the Mumbai airport during stormy weather.
For, the lack of a weather radar at the airport means that pilots do not have access to meteorological data, which is crucial for them to get the plane and its passengers on the ground safely, especially during the monsoon.
"It is essential for weather radar to be in place, especially during the rainy season, as communication about meteorological conditions from the ground is essential for a pilot to make a safe landing," said a pilot of a private airline, on condition of anonymity.
"Before reaching the runways in Mumbai, we have to maintain a height of 3,500 feet rather than the 2,000 feet that we would maintain if weather radar was present.
Despite modern aircraft being fitted with radars of different kinds, the lack of weather radar at the airport creates communication problems between the cockpit and the ground staff in case of bad weather," said another pilot.
In the absence of its own weather radar, the Mumbai Air Traffic Control (ATC) is dependent on the Doppler radar in Colaba maintained by the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD).
The weather report is sent to the ATC from there.
Confirming this, IMD's former director Ravi Shankar, who is also a member of the Civil Aviation Ministry's Safety Advisory Committee, said, "The Mumbai airport is largely dependent on the Doppler radar installed in Navy Nagar which belongs to the IMD.
Although the Mumbai airport has a meteorological office, there is a communication gap as the department comes under the IMD and not the airport authority.
We are discussing the problem with higher authorities, who are convinced that the meteorological office at the airport should be brought under the airport authority to make functioning easier."
Despite several attempts, the general manager of the Mumbai ATC could not be reached for comment.
700 flights take-offs and land at the Mumbai airport every day.
Ground radars were installed in the country's airports at a cost of Rs 400 crore only after a hue and cry was raised in Parliament over an Antonov AN-26 aircraft entering Indian airspace undetected, to drop arms in 1995 an incident which later came to be known as the Purulia arms drop case.