ATC Guild seeks govt probe into recent AMSS failure at Delhi airport

The Air Traffic Controllers’ Guild has urged the civil aviation ministry to probe the recent failure of the Automatic Message Switching System (AMSS) at the Delhi airport and also review the system upgrades at other major airports.

The demand comes after a technical problem with the AMSS, which supports air traffic control’s flight planning process, resulted in delays of more than 800 flights and the cancellation of 46 flights at the Delhi airport on Friday.

In a three-page letter on Wednesday, the Air Traffic Controllers’ (ATC) Guild said there is an urgent need to evaluate the “efficiency, accountability and structural logic of AAI’s Communication, Navigation and Surveillance (CNS) wing”.

State-owned Airports Authority of India (AAI) provides air traffic control and CNS services.

The guild has sought an investigation by the ministry into the AMSS failure, saying the “responsible officials shall be held accountable to avoid such technical faults in future, impacting the common passengers at large”.

On November 8, Civil Aviation Minister K Rammohan Naidu directed officials to conduct a detailed root-cause analysis of the technical glitch and to put in place backup servers to boost operations.

The guild, in the letter, said the automation system under consideration for upgradation at Mumbai, Bangalore, and other Metro airports doesn’t seem capable of handling the current heavy traffic load.

“We request to review these system upgrades to handle the traffic load efficiently for safe air traffic services,” it said.

At the national capital’s Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA), also the country’s busiest airport, air traffic controllers handle more than 2,500 aircraft movements daily.

Among other demands, the guild said OEM-backed life-cycle maintenance contracts with Thales, Raytheon, Indra, Honeywell, ECIL, and BEL should be adopted to reduce reliance on internal ANS manpower.

OEM and ANS refer to original equipment manufacturer and air navigation services, respectively.

Also, the grouping has called for modernisation and strengthening of “ANS infrastructure with redundancy systems (parallel AMSS, fallback servers, and modern automation tools)”.

Flagging serious concerns about the existing structure, the guild said AAI is not only paying for installation and annual maintenance contract of the CNS infrastructure but is also “hugely burdened for maintaining a huge technical staff which seldom rectifies any technical glitch in CNS systems, costing double to AAI”.

It also cited that the OEM ELDIS Pardubice, with about 250 employees globally, manages hundreds of radar systems across continents, including India.

“Yet, AAI employs nearly 500-600 CNS personnel just to manage these systems domestically,” the letter said.

ELDIS Pardubice is a maker of active radar systems.

India is one of the world’s fastest-growing civil aviation markets.