Fog sparks IGI chaos

New Delhi: Dense fog on Thursday morning and a faulty instrument landing system threw operations out of gear at the IGI Airport, resulting in delays till late evening. Flight schedules were disrupted by one to six hours even as six international flights had to be diverted.
The ILS localiser, that aids low visibility landing on the main runway, was out of service between 3.45 am and 10.12 am, the most crucial hours of the low visibility period. Consequently, the new runway, that is at a distance of about 4-km from the main runway, was in use for both arrivals and departures, leading to a massive backlog as it took flights about 40 minutes just to position themselves for take-off on the runway. "On a day with normal visibility, it takes a domestic flight about 20 minutes to taxi from the new runway to the domestic apron. During dense fog, when the speed of the aircraft is slow in any case, it took one flight an easy 40-50 minutes to reach the runway. With both arrivals and take-offs scheduled from there, the schedules went for a complete toss,'' said an airline official.
An Air India (IC) flight to Raipur that left the bay at 6.55 am, finally took-off at 8.50 am. "We boarded our CAT-IIIB compliant flights according to schedule but the passengers were stuck on board for at least two hours due to the sequencing. Several CAT-IIIB complaint flights were stuck similarly since they were not sequenced in the correct order,'' said an Air India spokesperson.
However, due to the nature of the fog and the fact that it had set in very early, almost all domestic flights were rescheduled. "Flights that were to leave for Delhi were held back in the originating stations till we got clearence from the air traffic control. Consequently there were no domestic diversions,'' said sources.
13/02/09 Neha Lalchandani/Times of India

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Categories: Airports Feb 2009