Delhi airport plunges into chaos

New Delhi: The rains poured down in Mumbai, and Delhi’s IGI airport promptly plunged into chaos. No flight could take off to the financial capital for four hours in the afternoon, leaving behind a trail of stranded passengers.
To make matters worse, the runway at Mumbai was waterlogged and the Instrument Landing System had stopped working. While some flights that took off as early as 9 am for Mumbai could not land there and had to be diverted to Ahmedabad or Vadodara, operations at Mumbai airport were suspended from 11.55 am to 1.05 pm, during which time 56 flights were cancelled and diverted. The outlook for Sunday also doesn’t look good as the Mumbai Met department has predicted heavy rain for the weekend.
Once rains slowed down after 1.30 pm, Mumbai first allowed delayed departures to take off, then there was a long queue of arrivals. As a result, passengers scheduled to fly from Delhi to Mumbai either had to wait for several hours or rescheduled their plans. The situation at cramped 1B terminal was, as usual, the worst.
All airlines faced similar problems, delays of five-six hours were common.
DIAL said six flights were cancelled and eight that had taken off for Mumbai were diverted. All airlines said most of their flights were running late by two-five hours.
01/07/07 Neha Lalchandani/Times of India

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Categories: Airports Jul 2007