India’s One Airspace Idea

Context

India is planning a major move to unify its four Flight Information Regions (FIRs) in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai, into one continuous airspace in Nagpur and have harmonized Air Traffic Management from Nagpur which has a unique central location in the country.                                                   

1: Dimension- Persistent Challenges in air traffic management

• Inefficient air traffic management exacerbates congestion issues and compromises flight safety. India's airspace is fragmented, with multiple air traffic control (ATC) authorities responsible for different regions, leading to coordination challenges and suboptimal routing.
• Skies are already capacity-crunched and are set to become even more so with the advent of new airspace users such as electric vertical take-off and landing aircrafts (eVTOLs).
• Managing increased volume of airborne vehicles efficiently, while maintaining or even enhancing safety and avoiding congestion, represents a significant challenge.

2: Dimension- Impact of the move

• The single continuum Flight Information Region (FIR) would yield a lot of benefits in terms of safety, efficiency, user satisfaction, reduced carbon footprint and optimum manpower utilization.
• Indian Single Sky Harmonized Air Traffic Management at Nagpur (ISHAN) is expected to reduce separations (between flights) and have more fuel-efficient flight paths for aircraft.
• The unification aims to streamline and enhance air traffic management (ATM) operations in the region.
• If this plan is implemented, the air traffic controllers of every area control would not be required to coordinate for domestic flights flying above 25,000 ft (flights in the upper airspace) as they would all be handled by Air traffic controllers (ATCOs) in Nagpur.
• The ATCOs in every region or airport would then only work to guide the flights approaching or taking off from an airport until it enters the upper space which is referred to as ‘Area control’ in aviation parlance”.