India needs a new passenger-handling manual for hopelessly delayed flights
Fog in Delhi is an annual event, and extraordinarily long lasting this winter. It has delayed flights, trains, caused accidents on roads and created heartburn all around. So far, so expected.
But we have also had some unexpected consequences: a passenger assaulting pilot announcing that the flight would be delayed yet longer, passengers having their meal, sitting on the tarmac, in protest. The government has issued a show-cause notice to the airline and the Bureau of Civil Aviation Safety has slapped hefty fines on the airline and the airport where the tarmac picnic occurred, for endangering safety. Such fines might help to send out the message that the government is not asleep at the wheel, but do not address the problem at hand.
The root cause, of course, the Met department’s inability to create accurate short-term forecasts on fog episodes. If Met could forecast the onset of fog and the lifting of fog better, airlines could tailor their schedules around these certainties. But we are far from having a handle on the behaviour of fog and the factors underlying it.
If this is a piece of forecasting technology that is missing, the technology to fly in poor visibility is missing, too. Instrument landing systems, several generations of them, are available. Both the runway and the planes have to be equipped with the capability for landing with poor visibility.
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