Beastly flying conditions

AHMEDABAD: New enemies emerge each year. Sometimes the adversary flies into the path of an aircraft in the sky at other times challenge the pilot by running towards a plane taking-off and others leap around the runway denying aircraft the space to land.
As airports in the country work toward extending passenger facilities, officials at Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International airport are kept busy by these unwanted visitors - birds, dogs and monkeys.
On Monday, a quarterly meeting of the airfield environment management committee was held to discuss these problems. Committee members are mulling several changes in the airport to keep the critters from disrupting and endangering flights.
A senior airport official said: "I have worked at several airports in the country for two decades, but incidents like here are unheard of. Every year we have to battle a new enemy.
The airport seems to be turning into a sanctuary."
"In 2009, bird hits had become a major concern as, every month on average, winged creatures would hit a plane damaging some critical part of the aircraft. This would ground the plane till engineers replaced the damaged part. What followed is a series of meeting with different agencies and with help of experts bird-hit counter measures were introduced," said a senior Airport Authority of India (AAI) official.
In the last two years, Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) officials raided several meats shops and eateries around the airport which were throwing waste in the open, attracting birds.
"These measures helped us bring down the number of bird hits but then came the dog menace. Incidents of dogs running on the runway and take-offs and scaring passengers at terminals became frequent in 2010. For a few months, AMC's dog squad was stationed at the airport and every dog seen in the airport was caught," said a senior Ahmedabad airport official.
However, just when things looked better at Ahmedabad airport as a new swanky Rs 350-crore international terminal became operational, monkeys, in large numbers, began camping on the runway.
"Early 2011, gangs of 15 to 20 monkeys would stroll and jump around the runway, forcing us to delay landings. Later we took the help of forest and zoo officials to check the menace," the official said.