Smooth Take-Offs, Smoother Landings

As India gets ready for growth in the skies, work is going on behind the scenes to ease the ‘growing pains’. Even so, a lot more needs to be – and in a hurry…

Why are we in a fire-fighting mode?” asked Jayant Sinha, Minister of State for Civil Aviation. He was concerned specifically about the humongous growth that is being witnessed in the country’s aviation sector on one hand, while the backbone supporting that sector has lagged behind. For him, the country had to tackle three priorities in view of the growth: Use airspace better; maintain safety, and upgrade technology. Tackling all three priorities would boost the sector but what was needed, said the engineer-turned-minister Sinha, was, “Decision science”. Simply put, Minister Sinha wanted stakeholders in the aviation sector to think, decide and plan about the future.

He, however, held out a word of caution: China too had seen growth but witness the long delays at airports. So far this year, the country experienced 7,000 more flight delays per day than it did last year, as increases in unfavourable weather, military exercises and wayward drones have kept China’s planes grounded. With the world’s second-largest population of air passengers, China’s on-time flight rate reached a three-year low this year of 71.8 per cent, nearly 6 percentage points lower than the same period for 2016, according to the Civil Aviation Administration.

“We must learn from the example of China, which has faced tremendous problems in managing its aviation growth which took place at a rate of 10 per cent annually,” said Sinha. India, then had to learn a lesson from the Chinese experience: prepare not for tomorrow but for 2550 years down the line. As Sinha put it: India with a growth rate of more than 20 per cent has to learn what needs to be done to not face problems that countries even as technologically developed as China have.