Chaotic confidence at 'Prayers in the ari' (Islamabad - aviation)

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http://www.jrnl.com/news/99/Dec/jrn97221299.html

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Chaotic confidence at `Prayers in the air'

By JASON BURKE London Observer Service

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - A weekday morning and it's chaos as usual at Islamabad airport. One of the flights from the Persian Gulf is late and crowds of relatives are waiting to welcome their brothers and fathers back from their work as drivers and laborers in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

The throng - maybe 300 strong - waits patiently. Most are tribal people from Pakistan's northwest frontier; they squat on their haunches in their white turbans impassively watching the clattering arrivals board mark each new plane that comes in. The Persian Gulf flight is not among them.

Out on the apron, things are frantic. An Emirates flight to Britain is about to take off and the 747 taxies toward the single runway past Pakistani army jet fighters outside their camouflage-netted bunkers. The anti-aircraft guns that lined the runway during last summer's undeclared war with India have gone, but their positions are still guarded by soldiers.

Opposite the jet fighters, three small planes painted in the white and blue of the United Nations stand ready for any emergency in neighboring Afghanistan.

Next to them a row of Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) 737 and 727s - used for domestic flights - are being refueled, re-watered and loaded with piles of plastic-wrapped sandwiches. Crowds of officials, mechanics, stewards, air crew, ground crew, soldiers and security men stand around looking busy.

PIA has a variety of nicknames - ``Prayers In the Air,'' ``Passengers In Agony'' and, a favorite among less patient Western expatriates, ``Perhaps Inshallah Arrival.''

The latter, meaning ``If Allah wills it,'' now seems ominously appropriate given the impending millennium and consequent problems.

For Mohammed Younas, there's nothing to worry about. He's director of technical services for the Civil Aviation Authority, which runs Pakistan's airports, and so is responsible for the safe functioning of those airports come Dec. 31 and Y2K.

He's convinced everything is under control. ``We have done the final debugging and are now on to the final verification,'' he said last week. ``We are just putting in the last touches. I am confident there won't be a problem.''

Younas and his team have been working on Pakistan's 42 domestic and international airports since March.

At Islamabad, the capital city, they found they were helped by the antiquated nature of much of the equipment - some of which was still semi-mechanical. The coordination of planes on the apron was largely manual, and the fuel supply was noncomputerized - as were almost all ground services (food, baggage handling and the like).

There's no problem with the weather radar because there is no weather radar. All the other radar and control-tower functions were checked and found to have ``no clock functions.''

However, at Karachi, Pakistan's commercial center and its biggest air transport hub, things are different. There, a team from the French company Airsystems has been working hard for total Y2K compliance.

The main problems have been with Pakistan's communications and radar systems. The former is essential for letting all pilots and controllers know who is entering and leaving Pakistani airspace, where they are and what they plan to do, as well as passing on meteorological information. Both systems are crucial and the CAA has spent around $800,000 on making sure there are no problems. The French team says all will be completed well within deadline.

However, both Islamabad, which handles around 40 flights a day, and Karachi, which handles more than a hundred, may have a communication problem. Although Pakistan's Y2K committee czar, Khwaja Aziz, says he's confident that the state telephone company, PTCL, has made sure everything is compliant, others are less sanguine.

Younas has ordered dozens of Inmarsat satellite phones as a backup, and Mazhar Hafiz, information technology director of Aero Asia, one of Pakistan's new private airlines, is taking similar precautions.

Mazhar's company flies Russian Yak-40 planes throughout Pakistan and the Persian Gulf from bases at Islamabad and Karachi. ``My network will be compliant,'' he said last week. ``But what happens when communications systems elsewhere go down? We have contingency plans, but many don't.''

One problem, according to Mazhar, is the prevailing ``wait and see'' culture in Pakistan. ``Due to the economic situation, no one likes investing money in precautions which might not be needed,'' he said. ``People here prefer to wait and see what crops up and then sort it out.''

Clearly, however, it's not going to be possible to wait and see what happens to PIA's fleet of 44 aircraft. There have been press reports claiming that PIA is far from fully compliant.

A PIA spokesman, however, says that the International Aviation Authority has been told that there is no problem ``because there will be no problem."



-- Homer Beanfang (Bats@inbellfry.com), December 22, 1999

Answers

Fantastic posting! I loved the explanations for "PIA." And their "Wait and see" approach seems to be an extension of fix on failure.

Charcoal.

-- Mad Monk (madmonk@hawaiian.net), December 22, 1999.


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