NEW DELHI: ( MEDIA REPORT )
In a nightmarish scenario for airport authorities, IGI’s air traffic control(ATC) suffered a reported systems failure on Tuesday evening. The trouble began around 6pm and prevented the ATC radars from giving flight details of all the blips — each representing an aircraft coming in to land at Delhi or flying nearby. Times of India reported.
Given fears of a possible terror attack, the ATC’s difficulty in identifying aircraft could have become a security issue. A senior airline official said that authorities must probe whether it was a regular technical failure or a cyber attack.
To handle the situation, the ATC went “pro control” –giving a time gap of almost five minutes between two arrivals and an equally big gap between two departures. This led to serious delays during peak departure time in the evening, which continued till late into the night. Around 9pm, the ATC reportedly asked other airports to delay departures of Delhi-bound flights.
To make matters worse, the ATC failure coincided with bad weather, making landing at IGI a difficult task for incoming aircraft. In adverse weather conditions, pilots prefer to divert to alternate airports — Lucknow and Jaipur, in Delhi’s case — instead of hovering and running low on fuel