Hazardous Ratmalana airport wall – a response

This is a response to a recent letter

by Citizen S

When this Seeya was a small boy his parents used to visit his grandmother, who lived in Moratuwa, with the rest of the family. It was usually at night time after his father came back from work and after dinner. All the kids were washed and dressed in their night clothes (the senior family members in sarong while the smaller ones like Seeya in Pyjamas). Since the next day was a school day, we could go directly to bed, on our return.

On the way back, more often than not, while entering Galle Road from de Mel’s Road, Moratuwa, Seeya’s father looked up from the driving seat and peered through the wind screen, saw the moving beam of light of the Ratmalana Control Tower’s Rotating Beacon with alternating Green and White and said

“An aircraft is about to land, let’s take a look”

(The flashing green and white is how the pilots see it from the aircraft flight deck and is usually allocated to civil airports.)

We would park on Galle Road end and stand by the fence in a line and watch the DC 3 Dakota coming to land with its landing lights on and then touch down with double ‘squeak’. Obviously, it made a lasting impression on the children as two of the five children became pilots (40%). We could identify each type of aircraft, flying overhead our home just by the engine noise pretty much like how we could identify cars those days.

Unfortunately, our children didn’t get that opportunity as they were all growing up during the thirty-year war where they couldn’t even fly a model aircraft for fun, as they were all banned by the Ministry of Defence (MOD). The SLAF came directly under the President. The then Director General of Civil Aviation Authority Sri Lanka (DGCAASL) had no direct access to the President and had to work through the Ministry Secretary and the Minister of Aviation to access the President. Each and every concession granted by CAASL to accommodate aviation enthusiasts were ‘shot down’ by short sighted Commanders of the SLAF. It seemed that the safest aircraft was an aircraft on ground. We certainly cut our nose to spite

our face.

It need not have been that way. It could have been easily done under strict supervision of the CAASL and/or the SLAF. As Capt Anil Jayasinghe, a veteran Boeing 747 pilot said recently in a speech at a Model Aircraft Show held after 35 years, at the Ratmalana Airport, arranged by The Colombo Flying Club and the AASL.

Instead of encouraging the next generation to take up aviation, they even built a wall!

For heaven’s sake if not for air safety reasons, for the sake of the next generation, remove that wall at the Ratmalana Airport and replace it with a fence capable of snagging a medium size aircraft. See photographic evidence given below.

The MOD only ‘recommended’ that wall be kept. Sadly the Airport and Aviation Sri Lanka Board are afraid to take action for the progress of General Aviation of Sri Lanka. Why don’t the three owners (CAASL, AASL and SLAF) meet and decide the fate of the wall?

GUWAN SEEYA