NEW DELHI: As regular near-miss incidents involving aircraft raise questions over passenger and airplane safety across the country’s airports, the Airports Authority of India (AAI) is struggling to fill around 4,500 vacancies of Air Traffic Controllers (ATCO). Most of them are leaving the their job due to stressful working conditions and low pay compared to global standards. After two planes almost collided at the Indira Gandhi International Airport here on December 27, AAI is yet to suggest ways to prevent such incidents caused by dismal working conditions of air traffic controllers.
All is not well with India’s airports with Air Traffic Controllers (ATCOs) overworked, quitting for better pay and working conditions overseas. This is putting passenger safety in peril, with frequent near-misses of aircraft on runways.
Government sources said the Airports Authority of India (AAI) will expedite hiring ATCOs. This has to be done considering expansion of India’s civil aviation sector, which is growing at annual rate of 18-21 per cent since 2013.
In 2014, global advisory firm Washington Consultation Group pegged the shortage of ATCOs in India at 3,890. There are 2,300 ATCOs in India, of which 400 are in Delhi, and 290 each in Mumbai and Chennai.
Close to 600 new ATCOs will be assigned duty after completing their training early next year and the authority is interviewing first-class engineering graduates (one of the parameters for hiring ATCO) for the position of at least 400 ATCOs, said an AAI official.
Concerns before AAI is the high attrition rate with over 70 ATCOs in the past two years. The attrition figure is more than 220 ATCOs in the past five years, largely attributed to job stress and lack of pay parity with other PSUs, according to an AAI official.
There were 35 near-misses from March 2015 to March 2016, of which at least 11 were reported in Delhi airspace, eight in Chennai.