The Mangalore airport, with its table-top runway located on top of a hill, is not the only one in India where pilots find it difficult to land and passengers often get scared. Some pilots said that the airports at Leh, Srinagar, Kozhikode, Bagdogra, Agartala, Guwahati, Silchar, Lengpui, Port Blair, Kulu and those in the Northeastern states are also “tricky” ones, requiring some deft manoeuvring while landing and taking off.
If one airport has a difficult topography, another is uni-directional while yet another is located close to the international border with pilots running the risk of violating airspace of another nation.
“Port Blair airport is uni-directional. Due to the nearby hillocks an aircraft can land only from one direction and take off in the opposite direction,” Captain E. Daniel, an office bearer with the Madras Flying Club, and a pilot himself, said. According to him, the airfield in Kozhikode in Kerala is a bit dicey while landing and taking off during adverse weather conditions as it is surrounded by hillocks and there is a drop beyond the runway.
“There is nothing called safe and unsafe airfields. One can term airfields as simple and tricky. There are only safe and unsafe flying and ground conditions,” a wing commander with the Indian Air Force said on condition of anonymity. “It is wrong to say that accidents are waiting to happen in difficult airports. Even in other airports, planes have overshot the runway.”
—IANS