Here comes the white monster

The advent of fog is already sending shivers down the spines of airline staff and passengers

NEW DELHI/BANGALORE: Place: Delhi airport.

Time: an early December morning. One walks into the departure building. The situation is as chaotic as one would expect it to be in winter.

Airline counters have no staff, airport officials with bovine placidity on their faces feign ignorance about everything.

Hundreds of fatigued passengers sit or stand around, most glued to television screen for details of flights and some dozing off in chairs. 

The passenger lounge has the usual din of blaring announcements of various kinds, screaming security personnel and grumbling passengers.

It is not the perennially chaotic platform of  Old Delhi Railway station. This is the Delhi airport grappling with an old white monster- the FOG.

Will the monster fog create havoc in Delhi airport and create a chain effect by disrupting air traffic across  India this winter too? The answer is a big yes.

Crores of rupees of investments and state-of-the-art flying machines are no match for the thick veil of fog in the capital’s skyline.

The India Meteorological Department has already forecast that there will be 150 hours of visibility as low as 50 metres this winter.

And that is guaranteed to disrupt air traffic.

“We can’t stop fog from blurring the capital’s skyline but of course we are trying hard to minimise the inconvenience caused to passengers due to flight delays and disruptions this winter,” said a spokesperson of the Delhi International Airport Limited (DIAL).

If senior officials are to be believed then DIAL alone can’t take on the mighty veil of fog, which is going to strike anytime this week.

“It is for the airlines to train their pilots for landing and taking off in foggy conditions. The airlines need to streamline their customer care helplines to tell passengers about fog delays,” said a DIAL official.

But most airline pilots are not trained to land using CAT-IIIB instrument landing system. While the DGCA has sent an advisory note to give preference to the CAT-IIIB-compliant airlines, others have drawn winter schedules to alter the timings to avoid the fog.

“We have 148 CAT-III rated pilots and so we don’t expect many disruptions. If diverted we will provide transportation facility for the passengers to reach the destination,” said a Jet Airways spokesperson.

But other airlines such as Air Deccan, Spice Jet, Go Air, Indigo and Jetlite have very few CAT-III pilots and will use them in  rotation. 

“Since the lowest of the visibility is registered only in Delhi airport, we can do with a few CAT-III trained pilots,” said a senior pilot of Air Deccan that has around 20 trained pilots. But passengers of Jetlite and Spice Jet will have to face the worst since both don’t have CAT-III pilots for cost reasons.

“It requires at least Rs two lakh to train each pilot,” an official of Spice Jet said.