Airport Authority of India has denied that there was a major air scare at Kolkata airport following reports of a communications failure between the Air Traffic Controller (ATC) and some aircraft in mid-air. The Kolkata ATC reportedly lost contact with at least 300 aircraft for a few minutes due to a temporary link failure on Thursday morning.
The ATC also claimed it was a minor communications breakdown although it took nearly two hours to get the systems working again. Some reports claim that there was a power failure which resulted in the BSNL link failure at Kolkata’s Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport.
Calling it a technical issue, the AAI said that all ATCs are prepared to handle such problems. AAI officials have maintained that there was no safety issue at all.
"This information is not correct and there was no safety issue at all. It was technical issue and generally the ATC is prepared to handle such technical failures. The link failure resulted in data loss from certain radars. For approximately a radius of 400 kms around Kolkata there was no link failure and that's good enough for us," said Sanjay Jain, Regional Executive Director, Eastern Region, AAI.
After the link failure Kolkata ATC sought help from Nagpur and Varanasi ATCs to track the aircraft. The distance between the aircraft mid-air was increased to prevent any untoward incident.
Calling it a serious situation, former Director General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) Kanu Gohain said "such incidents of ATC loosing contact with aircraft are very rare".
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