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New Delhi: As unpredictable weather continues to disrupt travel in different parts of the country, greenfield airports are taking measures to tackle adverse weather conditions such as fog.
“As per the Master Plan, our South runway is CAT-II and North runway is going to be CAT-III,” a Navi Mumbai international airport spokesperson told Mint.
“The Mumbai metropolitan region unlike Delhi-National Capital Region and other cities in the country doesn’t experience fog like conditions as on date. However, the region experiences dense rainfall and changing climatic conditions hence having category II and III runways improves runway operations and safety during such times,” he added.
In aviation, Category III, or CAT III, refers to a type of instrument landing system (ILS) approach that allows aircraft to land in conditions of very low visibility, such as fog, rain, or snow with runway visual range of 50-200 metres. Separately, CAT-II is precision instrument approach with a runway visual range not less than 350m.
Currently, India has only six airports with capability to allow landings in conditions of extremely low visibility or CAT-IIIB conditions.
“In 2014, we had only one airport that had CAT-III approval and that was Delhi. Today we have six airports that are CAT-III including Lucknow, Kolkata, Amritsar, Jaipur, Bengaluru and Delhi,” Union civil aviation minister Jyotiraditya Scindia had said last week.
“This is an evolving phenomenon. We have a number of airports that are CAT-I, II enabled for example Ayodhya is already CAT-1 enabled. This will keep evolving. Many runways which are CAT-II enabled will become CAT-III…This is an evolving scenario, one that we are pushing as far as possible,” Scindia said.
Traditionally, the lack of CAT-III compliant runways has severely affected landing and take-offs at Indian airports in the northern and western parts of the country during fog. However, the recent winter season witnessed unusual fog conditions at Chennai and Hyderabad as well. This affected thousands of flights in this month causing delays and cancellations.
The Navi Mumbai airport is expected to complete the entire infrastructure work by end of December and is likely to be ready for commercial operations by March 2025, a senior executive aware of the development said.
“We are in dialogue with all domestic airlines for flight connectivity. In the international segment, Middle East airlines are showing strong interest in starting flights,” he said.
The Adani Group had achieved financial closure for Navi Mumbai International Airport Private Ltd, a subsidiary of Adani Enterprises Ltd for the greenfield international airport project in March 2022.
The Adani Group acquired a 74% stake in Mumbai’s international airport in July 2021 by picking up GVK Group’s 50.5% stake and a 23.5% stake from ACSA Global Ltd and Bid Services Division (Mauritius) Ltd (Bidvest). As a result, the group also gets to build and operate the Navi Mumbai airport. In February 2019, the Gautam Adani-led group had won bids for six AAI airports, including Lucknow, Mangaluru, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Guwahati and Thiruvananthapuram.
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Published: 31 Jan 2024, 11:30 PM IST
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