The Transportation Ministry has asked the Soekarno-Hatta International Airport authority and airlines to employ operational discipline and ensure that all their airport facilities were running well as flight traffic at the airport increased.

The ministry'€™s director general for air transportation, Herry Bakti Sukma Gumay, said air traffic at Soekarno-Hatta airport was being tightly monitored due to the density of flights. He said the airport'€™s emergency flight slots had been reduced to only 10 percent although they should be kept at 20 percent.

'€œA 10 percent emergency flight slot ratio is tolerable. It'€™s still safe for flights but it must not be reduced further,'€ he told journalists in Jakarta last week as quoted by kompas.com.

Herry said Soekarno-Hatta'€™s dense air traffic, which amounted to more than 1,200 flights every day, posed challenges not only to the airport'€™s management but also to the Air Transportation Directorate General, the state-owned Indonesian Flight Navigation Service (PPNPI), also known as AirNav Indonesia, and other flight operators.

'€œOur current challenge is how to manage air traffic flows,'€ Herry said.

He added that the airport'€™s management needed to ensure that all airport facilities ran well so as to avoid any disruptions to flights.

'€œAirline companies should also be disciplined in adhering to their flight schedules,'€ he added. (ebf)