NEW DELHI: Close on the heels of a miraculous crash landing on river by a bird-hit plane in New York and the engine of a Kolkata-Guwahati flight
The national committee of prevention of bird menace at airports is going to be revived after a gap of nearly two decades. This panel has experts from various fields like urban management and aviation to ensure airports in cities get a clean environment for safe movement of flights.
While setting up this panel may take some time, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has issued directives to all airport operators to immediately take some steps. "They have to activate local environment management committees, which are supposed to ensure that environs around airports are clean and cease to attract birds. Operators must deploy all measures like having bird chasers, crackers and other equipment to ensure safe aircraft movement at airports. If some of this equipment is with private agencies, the operators must hire them at the earliest," DGCA chief Nasim Zaidi said.
DGCA will do an audit of all airports in the country, especially those, where bird hits are a regular menace, like Vadodara, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai, which pilots dread. In fact, Delhi saw a major tragedy being averted last July when an Air Mauritius plane was bird hit just before the Airbus A-330 was about to lift off. The pilot applied emergency brakes at high speed that led to a fire in the plane's underbelly — 252 people on board were then evacuated using emergency chutes.
"The problem of planes approaching to land or about to take off suffering bird hits and endangering passenger lives is more than just an airport issue. The entire area around the airport has to be clean with no garbage dumped in open that could attract birds. Unfortunately, neither civic agencies nor people living or running commercial establishments near airports seem to be mindful of this," an airline official rued.
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