Mission ISHAN, India’s push for ‘one nation, one airspace’, will benefit airlines & passengers alike

Mission ISHAN, India’s push for ‘one nation, one airspace’, will benefit airlines & passengers alike

New Delhi: India has kickstarted the process of unifying its four airspace regions into one spanning the entire nation in order to streamline and enhance air traffic management.

The Airports Authority of India (AAI), the public entity responsible for air traffic management (ATM) services, last month invited expressions of interest (EoI) for the preparation of a detailed project report for an Indian Single Sky Harmonized Air Traffic Management at Nagpur (ISHAN).

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

The AAI provides ATM services over Indian airspace and adjoining oceanic areas 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.

This airspace is controlled through four flight information regions (FIRs) at Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Chennai, and a sub-flight information region at Guwahati.

FIRs 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.

Unifying these FIRs will mean that all of these can be managed and controlled from one point — in India’s case, Nagpur — which is expected to make air traffic operations more efficient, safer and seamless, enabling it to handle more capacity.

This is especially important given the huge boom that the aviation industry is witnessing.

According to the credit rating agency, ICRA, for FY2024 (April-March 2024), domestic air passenger traffic is estimated to be around 154 million, a year-on-year growth of 13 percent, surpassing the pre-Covid levels of about 142 million in FY2020.

By 2030, the aviation industry expects domestic passenger traffic to double to 300 million.

Challenges ahead

According to Shantanu Gangakhedkar, senior consultant, aerospace & defense at the consulting firm Frost & Sullivan, the key benefits of the move include seamless operation, reduced congestion, increased flight handling capacity, efficient route options and reduced flight times, leading to fuel savings.

However, he told ThePrint that this will require uniform technology implementation, changes in the existing processes, retraining of air traffic control officers and policy formulation — all of which will require time and investment.

“A single continuum FIR would yield a lot of benefits in terms of safety, efficiency, user satisfaction, reduced carbon footprint and optimum manpower utilisation,” the AAI tender inviting EoIs noted.

“To have the most efficient utilisation of airspace in terms of air traffic capacity, the airspace route structure and sector boundaries are required to be restructured holistically that will benefit all stakeholders,” it added.

The AAI emphasised that the consolidation of FIRs into continuous airspace centred in Nagpur is designed to refine and bolster ATM operations in the area.

It also noted that surveillance and communication gap areas have to be minimised to reap the benefits of the Single Sky Harmonized ATM, such as reduced separations (minimum distance that aircraft must fly apart) and fuel-efficient flight paths.

“For the implementation of ISHAN, a thorough study of current and projected air traffic growth, and the challenges related to the management of increased air traffic, would have to be carried out,” the AAI added.

Benefits of single airspace

Air Marshal Anil Chopra, who is a former director general at the Centre for Air Power Studies, explained 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, he added.

“The concept is already in use in Chennai and Kolkata, where the Chennai area controllers handle flights of Bengaluru, Trichy and Hyderabad, and Kolkata area controllers handle flights of Bhubaneswar and Varanasi,” he said.

He added that, with the unified airspace, a macro picture of air traffic flow, congestion and emergencies will be available to everyone at any point. “This will bring huge flexibility to flight routes. Routing flexibility will result in reduced travel time and lower fuel consumption. It will greatly reduce carbon footprint.”

Further, Chopra explained, that this will also reduce the workload of the air traffic controllers.

“A controller sitting at an ATC elsewhere in the country will be able to take over control of flights over another airport. Currently, there are no alternatives to deal with such an emergency, and hence, ISHAN will greatly improve safety,” he said.

The Air Marshal also pointed out that the Indian Air Force (IAF) has already done such an integration, which is called the Integrated Air Command and Control System (IACCS). With this system, IAF has a comprehensive real-time view of air situations over the entire country and parts of the neighbourhood.

“It is possible for a controller sitting in Guwahati to control an air intercept over the Rajasthan sector, or a controller in southern India to do the same ove ther Kashmir Valley,” Chopra told ThePrint.

(Edited by Richa Mishra)