The Indira Gandhi International Airport’s brand new Air Traffic Control (ATC) tower will miss its October deadline to start operations owing to software glitches, said Airports Authority of India (AAI) Chairman Guruprasad Mohapatra.
Software-related issues
“There will be a delay of two months in shifting the entire operations to the new ATC tower. We held a review 10 days ago and there have been some software-related problems. Originally, we were supposed to completely shift by October, which will now likely happen by December,” Mr. Mohapatra told The Hindu.
Construction of the ATC tower commenced in 2012. It been built at a cost of ₹350 crore. At 102 metres, the new ATC tower is among the tallest in the world. Its height will allow a 360 degree view of all the three runways at IGI, the apron area, and taxiways at both international and domestic terminals.
The software glitch pertains to adaptation of technology to the requirements of IGI Airport, the sources said.
“An ATC operation is safety critical. During the trial phase, we have to carry out predetermined tests and the entire system has to be fully loaded [with data] and tested. During the trial stage, we found that there were some teething problems in orienting the software to our specific requirement. Before we shift operations completely, we have to ensure that it is safe, there are no failures in the system and our traffic handling capacity does not get affected,” said a senior AAI official.
After the software has been successfully tested, the AAI will start its schedule of migration, which includes parallel operations (where both towers conduct simultaneous operations) and shadow operations (where the new tower conducts operations but is monitored by the old tower), following which a complete shift will be made to the new ATC tower.
