Beneath the Fog

Airport director Gary Cobb has said that the number of flights affected by low visibility at Ronaldsway simply don’t justify major investment in new equipment.

Mr Cobb was appointed in August.

The issue of flights being cancelled due to visibility issues at Ronaldsway is a semi-regular complaint of islanders, with the airport’s location making the situation worse.

Speaking to Gef, the airport director said the issue of visibility is a ‘really complex subject’.

He said: ‘For those who are listening who are technical experts, I’ll probably using imprecise terms which can upset the purists.

‘In terms of low visibility and fog, airports manage that by having instrument landing systems, which we call ILS and you have different categories depending on the severity of the fog. So Gatwick and Heathrow will have ILS Cat 3, which will pretty much allow you to land with 50feet visibility, if you’re coming down there, there’s no real stopping, so the aircraft will auto-land itself.

‘In terms of the level of precision that you want on that approach, which is what the ILS does, you then have to start to protect and do addition stuff around it to do it. In terms of runway, just using our main runway [26,08], that’s ILS and goes to category one, the same as Jersey, Shetlands, Dorking, lots of other island communities and it allows us to land in certain element of fog but there are situations when it will be too foggy for us to be able to land.’

Due to the location of Ronaldsway, approaching over King Bills is limited due to the gradient of the landing. There is more that can be done at the other end, coming down the coast of the island and over the sea, but even improving this has its issues.

‘In terms of where those lights current end, there is a shelf in the Irish Sea and there’s quite a big drop, so for us to be able to fix those lights and allow us to do more work to go to a greater instrument landing system, you’re probably talking into the tens of millions, which if you compare that to the amount of days of fog, it’s probably not worth it.

‘If you could do both runways, there’s probably more of an argument to have it, but having one runway being able to land in different minima to the other runway, means that should an aircraft take off and the wind change, whilst it could have landed, it’s now at a different end of the runway, which can’t take it.’

See our full interview below: