CHENNAI: Chennai airport will save 1,300 tonnes of aviation turbine fuel (ATF) and clip carbon emissions by 4,000 tonnes a year by having separate air traffic controllers (ATC) for arrival and departure of aircraft. The plan will be effected from September 15.
Sylvester Israel, general manager, air traffic management, Chennai, told Express that now a single ATC handled both departures and arrivals.
This meant the airport could handle only 32 aircraft an hour. Having separate ATCs for departure and arrival would increase the air traffic handling capacity a lot, the official believes.
“Now, a total of 32 aircraft (both arrival and departure) can be handled per hour. We will increase it to 36 per hour,” he said. This can save fuel as air traffic controllers can plan landings and departures by adjusting the spacing between two aircraft.
Similarly, there is a plan to bifurcate the oceanic airspace of Chennai, which covers around 4,00,000 sq nautical miles through which around 400 international overflying aircraft transit daily using the 14 international air routes that provide the vital connectivity between the eastern and western parts of the world.
Sylvester said the Airport Authority of India, Chennai, had done a project of sectorising the oceanic airspace as a trial. The airspace has been split into two sectors after assessing the workload of the controllers, traffic density in each sector, the number of traffic conflict points requiring controllers’ intervention and the communication or surveillance facilities available in each sector.
The project, which will be implemented after three phases of trials after Regulatory Safety Assessments, will go a long way not only in alleviating the workload of controllers but also in improving the operational efficiency of air navigation services in the oceanic airspace and enabling aircraft to get their optimum flight profile with greater safety.