E-Paper
Fog in Delhi disrupts flights in Mumbai
More trouble is expected in next two days, which may paralyse flights out of Delhi, reports Lalatendu Mishra.
This winter’s first fog at Delhi on Tuesday disrupted flight operations at the national capital causing flight cancellations and delays for more than three hours and in some case five hours. Due to cascading effects nearly 40 flights were affected out of Mumbai causing inconvenience to passengers and airlines.
“The situation was bad on Tuesday and it would go worse in the coming days as more dense fog is expected. There will be tremendous disruption of flights during low visibility periods,” said captain JS Dhillon, senior vice-president (flight operations) Spice Jet.
Since maximum numbers of flight operate between Delhi and Mumbai, passengers at the city airport had to bear the brunt of consequential delays of flight arrivals and departures.
Close to a dozen of flights of Indian Airlines were delayed by three hours while Jet Airways had to face delays of nearly 20 flights. The airline had to cancel six flights to different destinations including Mumbai. Other airlines too were not insulated.
An Air Sahara flight that was scheduled to take off from Mumbai for Goa at 12 noon finally took off close to 3.30 pm. Similarly, hundreds of passengers booked in morning flights returned to Mumbai in the evening.
At the Delhi airport since general visibility dropped below 50 meters and instrumental visibility below 100 meters between 6.20 am to 10 am low visibility procedures were enforced at Delhi airport to keep the operations running.
During this period only 34 international and domestic flight movements could be conducted as compared to nearly 120 movements under normal circumstances. In the most affected period six flights were diverted and three had to be cancelled.
This is only the beginning and more trouble is in store. As per the meteorological bureau predictions more dense fog with visibility of less than 50 meters is expected in the next two days paralysing flight operations out of Delhi.
“On Tuesday all of a sudden at 6.20 am the general visibility dropped below 50 meters as compared to 300 meters at 5.30 am, enforcing low visibility procedures. After 10 am the visibility improved to 250 meters. The condition will continue for the next two days with dense fog persisting,” said Dr RK Jenamani section incharge of IGI airport meteorological department.
Since more than 50 planes, parked in the night are expected to get struck due to very low visibility, flight operations through out the country is likely to be affected. Indian airlines having 400 CAT II and CAT III trained pilots to operate flights in low visibility conductions is better prepared to handle the chaos with minimal delays. A Delhi International Airport Ltd spokesman said that they have made arrangements to deal with the situation.
