"If the director general is more interested in making an airport operational than focusing on air safety, something is fundamentally wrong"
KATHMANDU, NOVEMBER 3
The conflict of interest in Nepal's civil aviation sector has once again been thrust to the fore, thanks to the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal's tactics to coerce international airlines to fly to the newly-constructed Gautam Buddha International Airport.
Apart from the lone Kuwaiti air carrier, Jazeera Airways, that saved the day on the day of the airport's inauguration by Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba, no airline has shown any inclination to operate to the land of Gautam Buddha, citing non-viability of business at the national pride project costing the exchequer over Rs 30 billion.
Additionally, the GBIA made operational roundthe-clock for nearly six months at the sheer whim of the then minister Prem Ale, has been bleeding the CAAN's coffers steadily.
The principal function of the Director General of Civil Aviation, the civil aviation regulator, is typically ensuring safety and regularity of flights, thereby upholding public interest with no fiduciary obligations to bother about.
Whereas, for the aerodrome services provider, the primary interest is to ensure return on investment by promoting airport building and associated facilities.
With the regulator veritably using its stick to force airlines to fly to a clearly-non-profit airport, the conflict-of-interest lies utterly exposed.
By resorting to cheap publicity tactics to ensure compliance with its diktat on flying to GBIA from the first day of November and cancelling full-booked flights to Delhi on the pretext of non-approval of the winter schedule, the authority has reinforced what the European Union has been saying for a decade - that there exists a clear conflict of interest, though, primarily on safety.
"If the director general is more interested in making an airport operational, regardless of the airline's preparedness, than focusing on air safety, something is fundamentally wrong with Nepal's civil aviation system," a former director general of the authority said on condition of anonymity.
"It is nonsensical to expect a commercial jetliner to divert to GBIA if conditions at Tribhuvan International Airport are non-conducive to landing in the winter season, as the crew may not have been trained to land at GBIA and doing so will constitute a safety hazard," a station manager of a major middle-east carrier said.
Without the primary landing aid - Instrument Landing System - made operational, reportedly because of the Indian side's reservations, it would be unlikely that the airport will ever serve as a key alternate airport to TIA, which the planners of the airport had erroneously assumed at the outset, a senior official at the Ministry of Culture, Tourism, and Civil Aviation said.
Despite the several crores worth of investment in the still-unused ILS installation and its warranty expiring without any usage, it remains to be seen whether the project planners and consultants will ever be brought to book for this egregious oversight by the national watchdogs, while the authority officials struggle to keep a brave face trying to sweep its gross blunder of building a runway abutting the international boundary with India, an aviation expert said.
A version of this article appears in the print on November 4, 2022 of The Himalayan Times.
