Mumbai Airport facing delays of up to 2 hours due to faulty air traffic radar automation system

The automation system at Mumbai Airport has been prone to several glitches and failures in the recent past.

The Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) on March 14 said that Mumbai's Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport facing delays of up to 2 hours due to faulty Air traffic radar automation system.

The officials added that air traffic radar automation system at Mumbai airport were down from 3 pm-5:15 pm. The officials said that air passenger traffic will be restored in a few hours after aircraft waiting for departure start clearing.

The automation system at Mumbai Airport has been prone to several glitches and failures in the recent past.

The Air Traffic Controllers Guild had written a letter to the Airports Authority of India and MoCA last year stating that the Air traffic radar automation system at the airport was old. The system faced more than 70 subsystem problems in June 2022.

The hardware for the current automation system is over 18 years old; while the lifespan of the system is estimated to be 10 years, said the letter. The system was procured keeping in mind the air traffic scenario that existed over two decades ago. The traffic has increased manifold thereafter and the airspace structure has changed.

All the changes done through software, though, are being implemented on the same hardware components-comprising workstations, servers, and recorders, among others, that is-which were already working at peak capacity way back in 2010.

To put it in perspective, we have upgraded our laptops/systems from 128 MB RAM to 5-8 GB RAM in the past 20 years. Had we been using the old system, we would not be able to even open a web browser or run a simple program.