Chief Minister Oommen Chandy rededicated on Tuesday the 1.60 million-euro modern radar system at the Thiruvananthapuram International Airport.
The upgraded facility includes a Route Surveillance Radar (RSR) and an Approach Surveillance Radar (ASR) and was installed as part of the Airports Authority of India’s effort to provide safe, efficient, and environment-friendly aircraft operations. ELDIS Pardubice, the Czech Republic-based company, had installed the radars, which replaced the 18-year-old Airport Surveillance Radar and the Monopulse Secondary Surveillance Radar (MSSR).
Indra, an air traffic control technology developed by the Spanish Information Technology and Defence Systems Company, has already come up at the Air Traffic Control. The data from the new radar is integrated with Indra.
The same data is also fed to and integrated with Chennai Air Traffic Services (ATS) Automation system, along with other radar feeds, for providing radar coverage at required redundancy levels over the south Indian airspace.
An innovative feature of the radar is Mode-S. Compared to the one that is being replaced, the call sign, route and speed can be passed to the Air Traffic Control from the cockpit.
Union Minister of State for Civil Aviation K.C. Venugopal, who switched on the radar system, said more aircraft could fly in airspace as the distance between two aircraft had been reduced from 80 nautical miles to 10 nautical miles. It would come in handy for the efforts of the government to develop the capital city as a travel and tourism hub.
Joint General Manager (ATM) Shibu Robert made a presentation of the radar and the new facilities that had come up to monitor the airspace. Minister for Health V.S. Sivakumar; Member (ANS), AAI, V. Somasundaram; and Airport Director V.N. Chandran spoke.
