Radar malfunction at T-3 hits flights
Even as regular international operations commenced from the new swanky integrated Terminal-3 at the New Delhi IGI airport from Wednesday evening, the Autotrack-3 Air Traffic Control (ATC) system and radars malfunctioned for about 20 minutes from about 5.50 pm on Wednesday. However, the Airports Authority of India said in a
statement that there were no flight delays on account of this. Delays in departures were reported for about 20 minutes from about 5.54 pm to 6.14 pm after the malfunction but ATC sources attributed this to VIP movement and not to the radar malfunction. AAI sources said that there was no threat to aviation safety since the other ATC system Autotrack-2 was on “hot standby” and “working simultaneously”. The Autotrack-3 system is currently undergoing trials. AAI officials denied that any planes were asked to circle over Delhi till the snag was rectified. The Autotrack-3 system has malfunctioned previously as well and this is proving to be a source of concern.
The new spacious T-3 has been built by DIAL—the operators of the New Delhi IGI airport. Domestic operations will begin from the T-3 from August 27. Civil aviation minister Praful Patel told a parliamentary committee on Tuesday that the next stage of expansion of the IGI airport — the construction of the T-4 terminal — would be done by 2016. He said that the T-3 has the capacity to handle a whopping 35 million passengers a year.
On Wednesday, an Air India flight from Tokyo became the first flight from which passengers disembarked at the new T-3. The flight from Tokyo landed at about 4.55 pm. The first flight to land was supposed to be an Air India flight from New York but the flight got delayed by about 20 minutes. A flight from Lahore was the last to land at the old Terminal-2 before flights began landing at the new T-3. The first flight from the T-3 took off at about 6.50 pm. There were about 16 aircraft movements (both landings and take-offs) from the T-3 on Wednesday.
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