Delhi fog chaos is back: flights delayed, passengers stranded

New Delhi/Mumbai: If your travel plans for the next few weeks include flying in or out of Delhi’s airport, here’s some advice: fly in the afternoon, or the evenings.
And if you’re really tempted to take that super-convenient early morning flight, just take a quick look at what happened at Delhi airport on Friday, the first day of serious fog in a season that could last all the way to the end of January.
By 10.30am, after five hours of less than 100m visibility on both the runways at the airport, close to 50 domestic flights, and about 14 international flights were either delayed for take-offs, or prevented from landing.
At the airport, passengers were packed in so tight that the airport asked airlines to put passengers on planes that then sat on the tarmac.
The delays cascaded through the entire day, leaving thousands of passengers from all the airlines stranded at airports such as Nagpur, Jaipur, Amritsar and elsewhere. At 4.30 in the afternoon, just eight of 45 arrivals were listed as on time, because it took the airlines so long to recover from the morning’s delays.
For the airlines, winter season is both a blessing and a curse. With so many people flying for the holidays, they are able to charge real money for their tickets in an industry that has bled really deep the entire year. But every fog day, with cancelled flights, the added costs of just trying to keep up with the cascading effects, and now the government mandated costs of feeding the frustrated passengers, can often wipe out any gains.
14/12/07 Mehul Srivastava and P.R. Sanjai/Livemint

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Categories: Airports Dec 2007, General Aviation Dec 2007, Safety Dec 2007