Flights delayed for lights

Calcutta: As the authorities got into the act of clearing the last hurdle to install the Category-II (CAT-II) instrumental landing system (ILS), flight schedules went haywire at Calcutta airport, with 10 flights — scheduled to take off between 5.12am and 7.04am — getting delayed by over two hours.
After the Jet Airways flight to Port Blair took off at 5.12am, flight services came to a halt due to poor visibility.
The authorities have blamed the nature factor for the early morning inconvenience caused to passengers.
“The existing CAT-I ILS is not being operated for the past four days as we are upgrading to CAT-II and so, the visibility requirement for landing has gone up to 2,000 metres. On Thursday morning, because of smog, visibility went down to 700 metres,” explained an airport official.
When CAT-I is operational, the minimum visibility required for landing is 550 metres.
But because of the changeover to CAT-II, the runway visual range equipment was not in use since Monday.
So, the pilots had to depend on manual reading of the runway visibility and hence, visibility requirement went up to 2,000 metres.
After around two hours, visibility improved again around 7am and flight services resumed.
11/05/07 The Telegraph

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Categories: Airports May 2007