Project for Unified Airspace to Make Air Traffic Seamless

India has initiatied the process of unifying its four airspace regions into one which covers the entire country. This will streamline and enhance air traffic management.

The Airports Authority of India (AAI) has invited expressions of interest for the preparation of a detailed project report for an Indian Single Sky Harmonized Air Traffic Management at Nagpur or ISHAN as the project is called, reports The Print.

This is expected to benefit not just airlines through seamless operations and increased flight handling capacity, but also passengers by reducing congestion and flying times.

The Airports Authority of India provides air traffic management services over India's airspace and adjoining oceans covering over 2.8 million square nautical miles, of which 1.04 million square nautical miles are continental and 1.76 million square nautical miles are oceanic. 

At present, this airspace is controlled through four flight information regions. These are located in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Chennai, and a sub-flight information region at Guwahati. 

Flight Information Regions are controlled by a single authority, which is responsible for providing air traffic services, such as information on weather conditions, visibility, wind and runway obstacles as well as alerting services, including search and rescue assistance. 

If these are unified, it will mean that all of these can be managed and controlled from one point, which will be in Nagpur in this case. This will make air traffic operation efficient, safer and seamless, enabling it to handle more capacity. 

India is at the cusp of an aviation boom and this year, domestic air passenger traffic is estimated to be around 154 million, an increase of 13 per cent. By 2030, the aviation industry expects domestic passenger traffic to double to 300 million.

Aviation experts opine that once ISHAN is implemented, all coordination for domestic flights flying in upper airspace (above 25,000 ft) will be handled by air traffic controllers (ATCOs) in Nagpur. The ATCOs in every region or airport would only be required to guide the flights approaching or taking off from an airport until they enter the upper space.

In metro cities like Chennai and Kolkata, a similar concept i already in use where the Chennai area controllers handle flights of Bengaluru, Trichy and Hyderabad, and Kolkata area controllers handle flights of Bhubaneswar and Varanasi.