Calcutta: First the good news: if fog is here, winter can’t be far behind. Now the bad news: if the season’s first-day-first-show is anything to go by, this winter could be an ordeal for the Calcutta flier.
Around 40 flights from the city were delayed by three hours on an average on Monday morning with curling fog lowering visibility at the airport to 50 metres, 300 metres less than the minimum recommended level for operations guided by the CAT II Instrument Landing System.
Nothing moved on the runway till 8.45am and as many as eight flights to the city were forced to hover over the airport for between 30 minutes to an hour before being cleared for landing. An Emirates flight from Dubai due to land during that period was stranded mid-air for an hour and 20 minutes.
Although airport officials cleared the rush-hour backlog on the runway quicker than many would have expected them to, thousands of fliers were still delayed, many of them stranded inside aircraft lined up on the taxiways.
The Alipore Met office confirmed that the moisture that hung heavy in the Monday morning air was fog, not smog. “This is the first of several foggy days between now and January-end,” Gokul Chandra Debnath, the director of the Regional Meteorological Centre, told Metro.
The weatherman attributed the fog to a western disturbance that passed over north Bengal on Sunday. “This also shows that winter is approaching, slowly but steadily,” Debnath said.
08/11/11 The Telegraph
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