Mumbai:
Mumbai is one of the busiest airports in the country and handles over 700 flights daily.
In the last year alone, traffic here has gone up by 40 flights a day. With so much congestion, a 45-minute flight delay is now the norm. And reports of near collisions are more and more frequent.
The blame often is laid at the door of the ATC which monitors flight movements. Yet even as pressure builds on this crucial operation, NDTV found it shockingly ill-equipped.
The Director General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has prescribed a limit of 32 flights per hour on the cross runways, yet in reality, during peak hours the ATC handles at least 20 per cent more flights per hour.
To handle this growing traffic, the ATC needs a staff of 300, but the current strength is just 200 - that's a 30 per cent staff crunch.
Internationally an ATC controller handles 10 flights at a given time while in Mumbai, one ATC controller sometimes handles twice or thrice that number.
If the ATC cannot handle these extra flights, then why were they sanctioned in the first place? The reason is profit. Private airport operators and the Airport Authority of India make money when flights take off and land. And demand for a premium sector like Mumbai is very high. Yet as air traffic balloons, an overworked and understaffed ATC is a danger that must not be ignored.