CHENNAI: The radar at Chennai Airport failed yet again on Wednesday evening and with that the recently installed Performance Based Navigation (PBN) system for air traffic control operations also had to be suspended.
The radar failure, a constant occurrence at Chennai Airport, confirmed the worst fears of airport officials _ that the PBN would not work in a non-radar environment.
Proper radar function is the basic for a smooth PBN system that was commissioned at the airport earlier in October.
The secondary radar that failed on Wednesday around 4.30pm was out of commission for more than 24 hours. The secondary radar is a ‘calibration, performance monitoring equipment’ with its basic function being monitoring aircraft movements in the larger area of 256 nautical miles. However, according to sources, the radar failed to take aircraft signals beyond 40 nautical miles of the airport and even within the 40 nautical miles it only showed a blip while failing to give aircraft information.
“With the secondary radar malfunctioning, the primary radar also failed. It failed to show us the aircraft’s position. Neither did it provide the alert for the aircraft’s call signal nor did it show the aircraft’s speed and altitude. With this pathetic state of affairs, we had no choice but to resort to man-guided procedural methods that is called the degraded mode of operations.
PBN had to be suspended. While there were no delays, we could not give higher altitude to aircraft for their optimum flying capacity. Most affected were aircraft in the north and north western region as they burned more fuel,” an airport source said.