Parallel taxiway at Nagpur airport can increase efficiency




By Vikas Vaidya


With starting of Approach Control Service for arriving and departing aircraft based on Radar (Surveillance sensor) at Nagpur’s Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar International Aiport, the parallel taxiway can add to the efficiency of traffic management. With reduction in time, if flights are increased then additional taxiway can be a great boon as far as operations are concerned.
The surveillance based approach control services could have been more efficient and fuel saving, had there been parallel taxiway/Rapid Exit Taxiway system at Nagpur airport. Many Passengers transiting through Airport, must have felt that aircraft take lot of taxi time on the runway including backtrack time due to lack of parallel taxiway/Rapid Exit Taxiway infrastructure at Nagpur airport. With the present state of available taxiway infrastructure at Nagpur Airport subsequent arrivals cannot be brought closer than 15 Nautical Miles (28Km) resulting in loss of time to subsequent arrivals and departures. Airport Authority of India (AAI) is requesting frequently to start another taxiway to Government of India to get one additional taxiway.
The taxiway is a path for a plane to reach a point after landing. The taxiway will help the Airport operator to cut down on the time taken by an aircraft to reach a runway and lead to fewer delays. Many airlines also want early provision of the taxiway in order to increase the efficiency of flight operators at Airport both time and cost wise.
AAI Airport Director at Nagpur airport Roshan Kamble said, “We have studied and did survey also of Runway Occupancy Time (ROT). We have taken the help of college students for this study. The study showed that at Nagpur airport the ROT is 3.5 minutes while the ROT at bigger airports is just 45 seconds. It means that we need to reduce ROT to make traffic management at runway more efficient. The ground infrastructure needed to be changed. The additional taxiway can make difference.”
Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Airport, Nagpur presently caters to around 46 scheduled and 5 numbers of flight movements per day. Besides these movements, Nagpur Airport Runway also caters to flight operations to Air India MRO unit situated adjacent to Airport.
According to reliable sources, right now there is no planning of bringing new additional taxiway. It is a part of proposed privatisation. It means that the private operators will do it. MIHAN India Limited (MIL) is handling the ground infrastructure. But unfortunately, the then Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel delayed the handing over of the airport to MIL damaging the earning prospects of MIL, because of which, making ground infrastructure at par with the bigger airports became difficult for MIL. Now, the people are paying the cost.

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