AIR ROUTE V500

Just what is holding things up in the resumption of overflight rights for Indian and Pakistani airliners over each other's territories? We can see no conceivable reason for New Delhi, which started the tit-for-tat, to keep this ban. By making civil aviation a pawn in the geopolitical games it likes to play, India is showing the world how petty it can be. It is exporting its own insecurity. Pakistan loses out more because PIA flights to Bangkok, Manila and Tokyo have to go around India, whereas Air India can just skirt Pakistan on its European flights out of Delhi. If that is how victories are tallied between these two nattering neighbours, then South Asia is headed for some nasty patch of turbulence ahead.

It is not just Pakistan and India that are hit; PIA's four-weekly flights from Karachi and Islamabad to Kathmandu used to be a lifeline for Nepali workers headed to and from the Gulf. It was also an important link for European and North American budget tourists to Nepal and an important route used by all Pakistanis coming to the numerous regional meetings and seminars held in Kathmandu. What India gains by snapping this link and hurting Nepal and regionalism to boot, we haven't figured out yet.

General Musharraf had the right idea and thumbed his nose at the Indians by flying through China to Nepal for his historic handshake with Prime Minister Vajpayee at the SAARC Summit in Kathmandu in early January. Now, why can't PIA's flight planners establish a new air route and use it to fly to Kathmandu? After all, Airway V500 heading out of Islamabad over Chitral and on to waypoint Firuz, then overflying the Wakhan Corridor in Afghanistan into China is already being used on the first segment of PIA's Islamabad- Beijing route. All that needs to be done is that at some point in the Urumqi Flight Information Region (FIR) the Chinese hand over the aircraft to the Kunming FIR and make the plane take a heading towards Lhasa flying more or less parallel to the Tsang Po (Bramhaputra River) over the Tibetan Plateau. Then, just before overflying Xigatse, the flight makes a right turn heading 214 degrees to follow the standard twice-weekly Lhasa-Kathmandu route taken by China Southwest Flight 407. This would bring the aircraft into Kathmandu FIR between the Makalu and Kangchenjunga massifs over the Arun Valley, allowing it to check waypoint Tumlingtar (Tango-tango-romeo) at DME 100 from KTM. It will then turn on a radial 280-degree inbound for a 20 DME arc and a standard VOR-DME approach to runway 02 at Kathmandu airport.

What say, PIA? Want to try that out? The Chinese would have no problems.

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