Government plans to split airspace for better air safety

Concerned by the number of near misses in the Indian skies, the aviation ministry has decided to apportion the Indian airspace into two categories to ensure focused monitoring by the Air Traffic Controllers’ office.

The airspace that commercial airliners use is between zero and 46,000 feet and this will be divided into lower airspace (up to 29,000 feet), and upper airspace (between 29,000 feet and 46,000 feet). This move will help in better monitoring of aircraft movement and improve the efficiency of Air Traffic Controllers (ATCOs) and make skies safer in the world’s highest expanding market.

The decision on bifurcation was taken at a meeting convened by aviation secretary RN Choubey on May 29 this year.


Explaining the benefits of the bifurcation, a senior ATC official said that the move will reduce workload on ATCOs and help enhance efficiency as well as safety.

“This bifurcation helps reduce load on ATCOs, as dedicated controllers can be assigned to guide flights overflying the Indian airspace or landing and taking off at Indian airports,” said a senior ATC official, who did not want to be identified.

The official said that this will reduce load on ATCOs and go a long way to reduce the number of near misses, or close calls, in the Indian skies.

Confirming the move, Airports Authority of India (AAI) chairman GP Mohapatra said that such initiatives help improve efficiency.

“These initiatives help us improve efficiency by reducing space between airplanes and cater to more number of airplanes in the same space,” Mohapatra explained.

The ATCOs at Indian airports are under huge stress due to a sheer shortage of these officers. According to estimates, India has between 2,500 and 2,800 ATCOs and need to hire about 1,200 more. The requirements are set to increase further as Indian aviation expands to unserved parts of the country under the regional connectivity scheme.

There has been a deficit because controllers were not hired for many years. Now, AAI has inducted about 600 ATCOs, who are under various phases of training. The hiring process for another 400 ATCOs is also under way.

With such initiatives, India aims to reduce the safety violations, or near misses, or air proxies, further. A government data shows that safety violations by airlines in Indian skies dropped to 269 in 2017 from 352 reported in 2016.

The data also shows that number of air miss incidents also declined to 26 in 2017 from 32 in 2016, when it has grown by 28% over 2015.