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A foggy New Year for air passengers

PHOTO: V. V. KRISHNAN

WAITING GAME: The scene at Delhi airport’s domestic terminal on New Year’s Day with flights hit hard by heavy fog.-

NEW DELHI: The New Year started on a foggy note for passengers at Indira Gandhi International Airport here on Thursday with as many as 200 flights delayed and over 25 cancelled.

Dense fog in the morning upset airline schedules in a big way with flights getting delayed by 30 minutes to five hours.

The flights were affected not only because of bad weather in Delhi but also because of poor weather conditions at airports in other cities like Jammu, Srinagar and Kanpur.

“Our flights to Srinagar, Jammu and Kanpur had to be cancelled due to poor visibility there. By the time the visibility improved, we could not fly as these airports have sunset limitations and do not have night landing facilities,” said an airline official.

Some airlines clubbed a couple of flights as the passenger traffic was light on the first day of the year.

“I was to fly by Jet Airways but the flight got cancelled. We were later accommodated in JetLite. By the time we reached Delhi, we were running late by over two hours,” said A. Ramamurthy coming in from Chennai.

Two domestic and three international flights were diverted to Jaipur and Mumbai.

“Our flight coming from London to Delhi was diverted to Mumbai due to congestion at Delhi Airport. It was almost a nine-hour journey and we could not have hovered in the sky any longer,” said an Air India official.

A number of travellers arriving in Delhi said their aircraft hovered over the city for over an hour as there was a lot of congestion at the airport.

“My flight from Thiruvananthapuram started on time at 6-15 in the morning. But we hovered above Delhi airport for about one and a half hours. The pilot informed us that there was a lot of congestion. We finally landed at 12-30 p.m.,” rued Sunita Arora.

Bangalore-based Venugopal said his flight, slated to land in Delhi at 11-30 a.m., managed to reach only around 1 p.m.

The congestion was attributed to the fact that only the main runway was being used for both arrivals and departures from 1 a.m. to about 11 a.m. on Thursday.

It was not clear why the third runway, which is CAT-III-B compliant at both the ends, could not be used during the low-visibility conditions, especially when aircraft were hovering above Delhi airport.

Earlier this week when fog wrought havoc at Delhi airport, the authorities said the pilots of different airlines preferred to use the main runway over the third runway as the former had better visibility. The third runway was being used for arrivals only after 11 a.m.

“The low visibility procedures (LVP) were implemented at 1 a.m. and terminated around 12 noon. The LVP lasted about 11 hours during which 101 flights, including 25 domestic arrivals, 36 domestic departures and 21 international arrivals, 19 international departures, operated out of IGI Airport,” airport sources said.

Meanwhile, fog delayed 36 trains, including five Rajdhanis, by three to ten hours on Thursday. Over 16 trains had to be rescheduled.

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