Passengers stranded at Pune airport

Pune: The Lohegaon airport witnessed chaos on Wednesday evening when the flight landing and take-off schedule went awry, partly due to tight scheduling to facilitate the ongoing runway repairs and inadequate space for parking aircraft, besides late arrivals of flights.
Two flights were left hovering over the airport for almost an hour, while one flight from Mumbai was told to return and another had a delayed take-off.
Three flights, which were to take off from Pune, had to be cancelled, leaving the airline authorities frantically running for arranging overnight stay for passengers in city hotels.
Nearly 450 passengers, including children and women, were affected. Some of them missed their connecting flights from the destinations they were headed for from Pune.
The Pune airport is part of the Indian Air Force's (IAF) Lohegaon air base and the Air Traffic Control (ATC) is manned by the IAF, which has stringent norms for movement of flights.
Passengers blamed bad management by the Airports Authority of India (AAI) and 'adamant' approach by the ATC officials in not clearing the flights for take-off despite their readiness as early as around 5 pm.
18/10/07 Times of India

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Categories: Airports Oct 2007