Flight tech boost for region - Indo-Bangla coordination meet for safer skies ends

N-E general manager (ATM) Malay Datta and (top) Azad Zahirul Islam, director, (ATS/Aerodrome) Civil Aviation Authority, Bangladesh

Calcutta, July 22: Repetitive flight plans may sound like aviation jargon to a layman. But for airport officials and airline operators in the region, it is what they aspire to achieve. And it seems to be on the cards at the conclusion of a three-day ATS coordination meeting between India and Bangladesh here today.

If things work out, then the N-E skies will be much safer and civil aviation will be much more organised.

“All the details of a regularly-operated flight, its route, time and so on are submitted by a pilot in a repetitive flight plan (RPL). However, none of the airports in the Northeast have this system because of lack of approval from Bangladesh. In the meet, it was decided to give the RPL a seven-day trial run in the Northeast,” Malay Datta, general manager (ATM), Airports Authority of India, N-E regional headquarters, said at the conclusion of the meeting, which was held after eight years.

According to Datta, this system-generated flight plan will increase efficiency and improve communication between aviation authorities of India and Bangladesh.

“When the rest of the country is using this advanced technology, we are still lagging behind and are using age-old methods of manual data input. Unnecessary errors and mishaps can be avoided once it is activated,” Datta said.

There is a daily movement of 70 flights in the region.

Director, (ATS/Aerodrome) Civil Aviation Authority, Bangladesh, Azad Zahirul Islam, who led the four-member team, said, “It was a successful and long-cherished meet. Two letter of agreements were signed, one between Calcutta and Dhaka and the other between Dhaka and Guwahati.”

“Many points were raised by our Indian counterparts which we will go back and discuss and try and reach mutually agreeable solutions. We also made a few suggestions and gave a few proposals,” he added.

The flight route from Calcutta to Northeast over Bangladesh from now will be controlled by the AAI. The Indian authorities have unofficially controlled this route, without any written agreement.

The authorities also discussed how both the countries can work together on search-and-rescue of crashed aircraft. If an Indian plane crashes in Bangladesh, Indian search-and-rescue teams cannot operate there and Bangladesh teams cannot do so either as it is an Indian aircraft. “Take Agartala airport for instance. A road separates the boundary wall from the international border. Most mishaps occur while landing and take-off. If an accident takes place and the aircraft falls on Bangladesh territory, we have no jurisdiction to go and conduct search-and-rescue,” Datta said.

The meeting decided to have talks with the BSF, BDR and the defence authorities of both the countries. “India and Bhutan already have such an agreement. We will try and frame one between India and Bangladesh,” Zahirul Islam said. This was why Bhutan could help in the search-and-rescue operations when the chopper carrying former Arunachal Pradesh chief minister Dorjee Khandu went missing and it was suspected it could have landed or crashed in the neighbouring country.

Apart from aviation authorities of both countries, Jet Airways and Air India pilots also attended the meet.

“The pilots gave valuable inputs and made the meet a complete success. In future, we will try and make it a biannual affair, once here and once in Bangladesh,” Islam said.