ATC Guild Raises Concerns Over New Concurrent Duty System

New Delhi, Nov 1 (PTI) Air traffic controllers' grouping ATC Guild on Wednesday raised concerns about the controllers having to do both surveillance and procedural activities at the same time in certain control areas.

This is the second time in less than a month that the ATC Guild (India) has flagged the issue to the civil aviation ministry, saying that the current practice could result in safety issues.

At present, one ATC has to do both surveillance and procedural activities at six control areas and the guild has sought replacing the system by having two controllers.

In a letter to the ministry, the guild has said that implementation of the Area Control (Surveillance & Procedural) Concurrent rating system has been implemented without "conducting any safety assessment".

Surveillance generally refers to radar activities. Broadly, procedural control refers to keeping track of flight movements in areas where there is no radar coverage and in oceanic areas.

Control area refers to the space on which an ATC keeps a tab of flight movements.

According to the guild, traffic density at major control sectors is already high and beyond the capacity of two controllers controlling aircraft in surveillance and procedural modes.

"Whereas, in new concurrent system the same traffic density is loaded over a single controller to provide all the functions of a surveillance and procedural control without declaration of reduction in sector capacity," the letter said.

At present, the concurrent system is in place for Chennai, Delhi, Nagpur, Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Kolkata ATC control areas.

The guild has also mentioned that it is not against changes but that the same should be done in a phased manner as per the aviation standards of change management with acceptable limits of hazards and proper mitigation measures to reduce the safety risk under safe limits.

"... we again reiterate our request for replacement of the current setup of ACC (S) and ACC (P) controllers with two ACC (S&P) concurrent rated controllers with one being responsible for surveillance services and other being responsible for procedural control services...," the letter said.

India is one of the world's fastest growing civil aviation markets, and domestic air traffic in the country is also on the rise.