Airport creaks under festive footfall

Calcutta: Ill-equipped Calcutta airport is tottering under the weight of Haj and holiday traffic, triggering chaos in the crowded terminals that have been handling three times the normal traffic over the past five days.
A senior official blamed the sudden surge in traffic for the mess, pointing out that the domestic terminal has been handling around 15,000 fliers on an average every day since last Thursday.
“The normal capacity is around 5,000 passengers a day, though we handle more than that regularly. With Puja and Haj coinciding this year, the rush has been unprecedented,” he said.
On Monday, around 16,000 passengers used the domestic terminal, the highest this festival season.
If long queues at the entry gates, check-in counters and the security hold weren’t frustrating enough, fliers have been inconvenienced by a shortage of trolleys and chairs. Sumanta Dey, who returned to Delhi on Monday morning after spending Puja in Calcutta, said the airport resembled Sealdah station.
Maya Devi, a 70-year-old resident of Park Street booked on a Kingfisher Airlines flight to Mumbai on Saturday, was forced to stand in a queue for 45 minutes for security check despite reaching the airport three hours before the scheduled departure.
Passengers also complained about inadequate seating arrangements.
The five security check-in points at the domestic terminal are proving to be inadequate. Officials claimed that there was no space in the building to increase the number of counters.
19/10/10 Sanjay Mandal/The Telegraph

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Categories: airports Oct 2010