ISLAMABAD, May 13: The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) will spend Rs400 million on upgrading its radars and allied facilities but senior officials insist that there is need to replace them altogether.

Ruling out the possibility of replacing old radars with new ones, CAA’s Director-General Mr Farooq Rehmatullah told this correspondent such a move was infeasible. “Radars are perfectly safe and sound,” he said.

Installation of new radars would have cost the country’s aviation regulator about Rs1.5 billion.

He said that the CAA ily handled over 700 flights every day – it included all flights passing over Pakistani territory and those departing and arriving at various airports in the country – and there had been no complaints about radars installed 15-20 years ago.

The serviceability record, he said, was nearly 99 per cent, which by any standards ‘is exceptionally very good’.

The upgradation project, which was likely to get under way shortly, is for benefiting from new technologies and addressing ageing of these machines.

The project envisaged addition of new features and upgradation of computers used in processing data from radars and an improved inter-communication voice system. “Once completed the radar system in the country would be very advanced,” Mr Kamal Raza, a general manager at the CAA said.

The CAA’s entire radar network comprises three primary surveillance radars, six secondary surveillance radars, two area control centres and an approach radar, but the project would mainly focus on enhancing the capacity of area control centres in Karachi and Lahore.

Officials say all equipment would be procured from original manufacturers. But they regret that they had to face a lot of pressure from agents of suppliers, trying to sell their equipment.

Additionally, the CAA would dualise satellite communication to cope with outages and thus provide 100 per cent coverage.

A VHF station is being set up at Zhob at cost of Rs2 million to improve regional coverage.

Modification of primary surveillance radar modulators through retrofit kits, officials said, was yet another step for ensuring optimum availability radars.

The CAA had been criticised by the National Assembly, where parliamentary secretary for defence Maj (retd) Tanvir Hussain had stated that antiquated air traffic control system could imperil even VVIP flights. This prompted Speaker Chaudhry Amir Hussain to seek a detailed report about the situation by May 15.

However, the CAA continued to maintain that all flights were safe and its systems were operating at optimum level.