What to Read in The Hindu Editorial( Topic and Syllabus wise)

Editorial 1: The primary lessons from the Reagan air crash

Context

The Reagan accident in the U.S. highlights the several factors that can result in a tragedy; there is also the danger of investigation agencies getting side-tracked.

 

Introduction

The tragic mid-air collision on January 29, 2025 between a United States Army Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines CRJ-700 flight while it was on the final approach path to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Washington DC, killing 67 people, brings out several aspects of human factors that can result in a tragedy.

• In this case, the first was having politicians jump the gun by blaming others, even before a formal investigation began and the bodies were yet to be recovered from the watery grave of the Potomac river.
• U.S. President Donald Trump was quick to blame former U.S. Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden for diluting U.S air safety standards, forgetting that it was he who held the reins in the interim four-year period.

 

Pressures, opaque investigations in India

• Mangaluru air accident (May 2010): One saw the same kind of political one-upmanship just after the air accident at Mangaluru in May 2010 when the Minister of Civil Aviation, Praful Patel, declared that the airport conformed to all standards of ICAO Annex 14, volume 1.
• Court inquiry and blame: Dutifully, the court of inquiry committee that was headed by a retired Air Marshal of the Indian Air Force, glossed over all the blatant violations of the Airports Authority of India, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), and the airline, Air India Express, by blaming only the pilot.
• Missing details in Indian reports: In all the air accident reports in India, one never gets detailed data from the digital flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder.
• Lack of transparency in India: Unlike in India, where the truth is hidden and restrictions placed on all access to information on the accident, photographs or data on the state of infrastructure, it is open in the rest of the world where one can analyse data with vital clues that are available.
• Comparison with U.S. air accident reports: There is a big lesson to be learnt from the air accident in the U.S.The radar track and the air traffic control audio tracks were openly available, and one could analyse and disseminate the facts instead of having doctored data and reports that have been vetted by a bureaucrat who ensures that there is nothing incriminating against the government and its agencies published in the final report.
• American Airlines flight: Let us take what has been put out by media sources in the U.S. What is generally known is that the American Airlines flight was given a runway change by air traffic control to accommodate a departure.
• Helicopter and human factor: The change was accepted by the crew. The helicopter, PAT25 (or Priority Air Transport), had taken off from a base nearby for a Proficiency training flight at night and had been informed about the passenger flight. The air traffic controller had asked the helicopter crew whether he had the passenger flight in sight. The pilot responded by saying he was visual with the plane and he was given clearance to maintain visual and pass behind the passenger flight.
• Challenges in night flying: This is where the human factor plays a big part. The flight was at night. Other than the navigation lights and the rotating beacon, the helicopter pilot had no other clue to make out the type of aircraft he had visual sighting with. His only information was based on the flight number.
• Radar picture and additional flight: If one looks at the radar picture available to the public and the information from the air traffic tape recording, there was another flight which was behind the American Airlines flight, but approaching the main runway that the American flight was originally approaching before the American crew accepted a side step to a different runway.

 

The ‘hurry syndrome’

• Helicopter pilot’s potential misidentification: Did the helicopter pilot wrongly identify this second flight to be the American flight when he reported visual to air traffic control? If one looks at the radar track of this second flight and the track being followed by the helicopter to “cross behind” (as instructed by air traffic control), it is quite likely that the helicopter crew had focused on the second flight rather than the American Airlines flight and were fixated on being behind the aircraft they had perhaps misidentified.
• Collision avoidance system: As both the helicopter and the American Airlines flight were below 1,000 feet above ground level, the collision avoidance system would not have sounded as it would have been inhibited below 1,000 ft.
• Press-on-itis: In aviation parlance, this is what one calls “Press-on-itis”, or the ‘hurry syndrome’, where once you get fixated, all other inputs cannot influence your judgement. One needs a fresh and clear mind to be able to maintain situational awareness and spatial orientation. Fatigue and stress have a major role in these situations.
• Air traffic control staffing: The initial reports indicate there was only a single air traffic tower controller at Reagan handling the flights when, normally, two controllers are on duty.
• Charkhi Dadri mid-air collision (1996): Soon after the Reagan accident, the visual media in India went on overdrive, with graphic presentations of the Charkhi Dadri mid-air collision in India, near New Delhi, on November 12, 1996. In this accident, a Kazakhstan Airlines flight from Chimkent, Kazakhstan to Delhicollided with a Saudi Arabian Airlines Boeing 747 flight from Delhi to Dhahran, killing 349 people. The pilot of the Kazakh flight was blamed for not complying with air traffic control clearance.
• Investigation tampering in Charkhi Dadri accident: What people are not aware of was a DGCA official who was in-charge of the investigation was removed from the investigation when he submitted his findings. It was another official who finalised the report. It is needless to say that the last nine minutes of the digital flight data recorder of the Saudia flight was a blank.
• Recent South Korea crash (2024): In the recent crash in South Korea, in December 2024, where a passenger flight landed with retracted wheels and crashed into an embankment housing the instrument landing system localiser antenna, South Korea, like India at the time of the Mangaluru crash, had not complied with the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Annex 14, Volume 1 Standard that mandated that all structures in the operational area shall be frangible (from January 1, 2010). Yet, ICAO gave them a clean chitduring the audits conducted.
• South Korea crash and flight data recorder: The Korean jet’s digital flight data recorder was also blank for the last four minutes.

 

Incidents in Bengaluru, Tiruchi

• Indigo flights incident (January 7, 2022): Let us not forget the case of two Indigo flights, on January 7, 2022 — one bound for Kolkata, and the other for Bhubaneshwar — that were departing from parallel runways at Bengaluru airport. The air traffic controllers had cleared planes for take-off. In the two runways at Bengaluru, one runway was to be used for take-offs and the other for landings simultaneously. It was a narrow escape for both planes.
• Incident reporting and oversight: Neither the airline nor the air traffic control reported the matter but the incident came to light during a safety audit. The lack of situational awareness and the lack of knowledge of the pilots on the functioning of the collision avoidance system were safety issues that were all swept under the carpet.
• Air India Express flight (October 11, 2024): On October 11, 2024, an Air India Express flight from Tiruchirappalli to Sharjah experienced hydraulic failure in one system. It circled for close to three hours before landing. But the political class in Tamil Nadu and the media went to town making a hero out of the captain who had exhibited very poor judgement when he could have made an overweight landing immediately.

 

Conclusion

This is another example of people with no knowledge of aviation passing judgements and influencing investigation agencies. The mid-air tragedy should open the eyes of the travelling public and know that safety is being compromised for brownie points.

Editorial 2: The saga of regulating India’s thermal power emissions

Context

Electricity consumers are likely to pay for installed but unused equipment, even as citizens living around thermal plants do not get the benefit of cleaner air.

 

Introduction

On December 30, 2024, India’s Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) issued a notification amending the Environment Protection Rules by pushing back the deadline for thermal plants to comply with sulphur dioxide (SO2) emission norms by three years without any reasons being given. As it happens, the existing deadline for about 20 gigawatts (GW) of thermal plants, all located in close proximity to densely populated areas, was December 31, 2024. This is the latest instance in a nearly decade-long saga that fans of Franz Kafka would find appealing.

• The MoEFCC revised the emission norms for Indian thermal plants in December 2015 after public consultations, and all thermal plants were expected to comply with them by December 2017 despite it being a tight deadline.
• This notification tightened the prevalent norms for particulate matter emissions and introduced norms for other emissions, including SO2, for the first time.
• These norms were understood to be broadly on a par with existing practices in countries such as Australia, China and the United States.

 

The morphing of a debate

• Indian coal and SO2 emission norms: Indian coal generally has a lower sulphur content than other coal, which should have made it easier for Indian thermal plants to meet the SO2 emission norms. But instead of focusing on the best ways to meet the norms — given Indian coal’s characteristics — the debate morphed into the challenges around implementing the flue gas desulphurisation (FGD) technology for desulphurising high-sulphur coal. Despite the norms never mandating FGDs, the discussion became one about issues such as the scheduling of FGD installations given their long gestation periods and the likely costs of installing them.
• Discourse questioning SO2 emission norms: In parallel, a different discourse questioning the SO2 emission norms themselves also took shape, often driven by different arms of the government. The Central Electricity Authority (CEA) published papers in 2020 and 2021, questioning the need for uniform norms across the country and proposing that its country-wide implementation be phased out till 2035. The CEA also commissioned a study from IIT Delhi in 2022, which concluded that the installation of FGDs does provide air quality benefits but argued for extending the timelines due to issues such as FGDs being expensive, their supply chain being inadequate, and their operation leading to increased coal consumption (and hence greenhouse gas emissions).
• CSIR-National Environmental Engineering Research Institute study (2024): In 2024, NITI Aayogcommissioned the CSIR-National Environmental Engineering Research Institute to conduct a study on this. The study concluded that SO2 emission norms are not important to achieve good ambient air quality in India, and instead the focus should be on particulate emissions. There was also one strand of debate about secondary aerosol formation from SO2 emissions as the reason to have norms for it even though Indian coal is relatively low sulphur.
• Prolonged debate: Thus, rather than debating these issues and building a consensus before notifying the first set of norms, the debate continues robustly nearly a decade after their notification.

 

Different deadlines

• Dilution of norms and deadline extensions: In the midst of the debates, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) diluted some norms and also extended, multiple times, the deadlines for compliance, with the notification of December 2024 being the fourth in the series.
• Different deadlines for thermal plants: As a result, there are different deadlines for thermal plants in different locations and for different types of emissions, with SO2 emission deadlines being well after the deadline for other emissions.
• Deadline for compliance with other emissions: The final deadline for compliance with other emissions, including particulate matter emissions, which are considered important by all government agencies, was December 31, 2024. Many plants were required to comply starting December 31 of 2022 and 2023.
• Verification of adherence: However, it is unclear if various pollution control boards are verifying adherence to even these norms, as there is no public source easily available that provides this information.

 

Consumer pays

• Contracts for FGDs and the latest notification: Many thermal plants have already tendered contracts to install FGDs, although not at the required pace to meet the earlier deadlines before the latest notification.
• Regulations to pass on costs: Electricity regulators introduced regulations to pass on the costs of installing FGDs and other pollution control equipment to electricity consumers, irrespective of whether the emission norms are met, to prevent the burden from falling on thermal plants.
• Installed and in-progress capacity: Despite the latest deadline of December 31, 2027 for meeting SO2 emission norms, 22 GW of thermal plants have already installed FGDs, and 102 GW (almost 50% of installed thermal capacity) is in advanced stages of setting up FGDs.
• Risk of underutilized FGDs: Given the new compliance timelines, plants with installed FGDs may not operate them, as this would increase the cost of generation, making them less preferred.
• Impact on consumers and the environment: Electricity consumers are likely to be paying for installed but unused equipment, while citizens living near thermal plants will not see the benefits of cleaner air for at least another three years, if not longer.

 

Conclusion

Perhaps this modern variant of Birbal’s khichdi will get cooked one day, but the institutional, environmental, health and financial costs of doing so are likely to end up being high. And, unlike the original fable, it is not even clear whether the right lessons would be learnt from this saga.