I have finally stopped procrastinating. This is good, because I can do things like learn how to be an air traffic controller in India. (That's not procrastinating, honest.) See why I love India most of the time? Because its air traffic controllers have a Cyber Home where they provide exhaustive information on runways, geographical conditions and the opening hours of post offices in every airport the length and breadth of India. And because Jason John, air traffic controller at Cochin airport, has provided a crossword he compiled (presumably while off-duty). In the spirit of full enclosure, there's also a list of air disasters, which strangely absolves Indian air traffic controllers of all blame in the worst ever mid-air collision which happened in 1996 near Delhi. This is because “the primary cause of accident as identified by the Court of Inquiry headed by Justice R C Lahoti of the Delhi High Court (now in the Supreme Court of India) was inability of the Kazakh cockpit crew to understand English.” Or use the definite article.
In conclusion, the Air Traffic Controllers Guild of India wishes all visitors “a nice un-controlled time”.
It's enough to make one forget that India's aviation boom has caused massively over-congested skies, that dozens of new airlines and 40% growth year on year are supposed to be served by one runway in Delhi and one in Mumbai and that infrastructure in general is about ten years behind the airline expansion. Oh, and that mid-air collision thing. Then again in the words of an aviation expert I spoke to today, “those are big skies.”
And those are big flying metal objects. Having seen a Metro driven by oiks smash into the central reservation of the M1 a few days ago, and crumple like, well, metal, I am not impressed with the safety properties of flying or driving metal cylinders. The oiks survived.