Fog back, so is chaos at IGI

New Delhi: A fresh spell of fog at the IGI Airport caught airlines and management completely off-guard and threw air traffic out of gear for most
of Tuesday. With the runway visual range (RVR) dropping to below 50 m for two hours in the morning, a whopping 25 flights were diverted to nearby cities. Around 200 flights were delayed throughout the day while about 8 were cancelled.
As per the Met department, visibility had started falling around 9.30 pm on Monday. During this time, visibility remained below 500 m and the RVR was below 1,500 m. However, by 4.30 am, very dense fog conditions developed over the area with visibility below 200 m while the RVR fluctuated between 50 and 800 m. Low visibility procedures had to be implemented between 5.34 am and 11.45 am allowing only 74 flights to operate. Between 8 am and 10 am, the RVR had gone below CAT-IIIC levels and no operations could take place. Delhi is equipped to handle operations only at CAT-III B levels when the RVR is at least 50 m.
Even though CAT-III conditions had developed by 5 am over the new runway and by 6.30 am over the main runway, at 7.30 am, the visibility fell further. Several early morning flights that had already been given the start-up clearance were stuck, with passengers having to sit in these aircrafts for about 3 hours till visibility improved.
"Since the fog caught everyone off guard, even the CAT-III compliant flights could not operate, either because they were stuck in non-CAT compliant bays or because they were behind non-CAT-III compliant in the line-up for take-off. Several delays were caused due to this confusion,'' said an airline official.
14/01/09 Neha Lalchandani/Times of India

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Categories: Airports Jan 2009