Kathmandu, ANN
The limited parking bay space and excessive number of aircraft operating from Tribhuvan International Airport (TIA) has created chaos on domestic parking bay of the airport. As the fleet size of domestic airliner has increased drastically and the flight frequency thus increased, a lot of traffic congestion can be observed in the ground too. The aircrafts are seen to be parked haphazardly out of the designated areas in the domestic ramp of TIA. The aircrafts parked out of the designated area creates blockage and hindrances in the taxiways.
Today’s morning, a very unsystematic parking could be observed with many aircrafts parked out of designated areas. The aircraft created trouble in starting engines and taxing of other aircrafts early in the morning. The ATR -72 aircraft parked out of the designated area created trouble to some of the flights that had to depart early in the morning as reported. Time and again this problem is repeating as TIA is the base station for major operators and all their aircraft needs to return TIA for parking.
Although, the airport authority has stopped assigning TIA as hub for new coming aircraft, most of the aircraft for the festive season and due to increased number of flight frequency gets parked in TIA only. Also the diverted flights to TIA add more aircraft in the parking zone. The private carriers are adding aircraft in their fleet very aggressively for the competitive market presently and some are waiting for arrival of their new addition too.
The airport parking bay has been designed to accommodate only 5 larger aircraft like ATR 72 and CRJ-700 and 12 other small aircraft like Jet Stream and Twin Otter. But Buddha Air only has 8 of the ATR 8 aircraft and Yeti Airlines is also operating 5 of the same type of aircraft. Shree Airlines is operating 2 CRJ 700 series aircraft already and is preparing to operate its recently added large sized Dash 8 aircraft. Although parking space has been designed to accommodate 17 aircraft, more than 30 aircraft are being parked in the apron area altogether.
