Sarajevo International Airport tested this last winter an “antifog system” for spreading cooled fog with liquid propane.
In the first test season, the system proved to be successful. Foggy mists in the winter months are the biggest problems for the regular operation of air traffic at Sarajevo airport, the spokeswoman of Sarajevo International Airport Sanja Bagaric-Arnaut said.
She added that in January, special diffuser devices were installed on several locations and two mobile diffusers launched on vehicles are operational.
“By releasing environmentally harmless chemical reagent of liquid propane, the fog turns into ice particles, that is, snow crystals that then fall into the ground in the form of precipitation,” Bagaric-Arnaut said.
She emphasized that “the system proved to be successful, and this was manifested by the increase of visibility and by the passing of the cooled fog inward.”
“Although it is a costly system, the results of the performed testing showed that investing in this system can be justified and useful in many ways. Therefore, the Sarajevo Airport decided to continue testing this system in order to be able to use the already existing Instrumental Landing System (the so-called ILS system) and even further improve the conditions for successful landing and take-off of airplanes from Sarajevo Airport,” she said.
She recalled that this was a system that was successfully tested during the Winter Olympic Games in 1984, not only at the Sarajevo International Airport, but also on the ski slopes, when the fog on several occasions threatened to interrupt the competition.
“This system can be efficiently applied under certain conditions, such as outside temperature below 0° C or up to some -7-8° C,” she noted.
(Source: Radosarajevo.ba)
