The new year has not been a happy flying experience for passengers in North India. On the night of January 5, fog over the Delhi airport was so thick that one of the runways was not available for operations between 9 pm on Sunday and 4 am the following day. This affected operations with flights getting cancelled and diverted.
Invariably passengers and those waiting to receive them at airports around the country were agitated as a journey, say between Delhi and Chennai that should have taken less than 3 hours was extended by several hours. Over 130 domestic and international flights recorded delays ranging between 30 minutes and three hours, and some had to be diverted to Jaipur, Ahmedabad and Lucknow.
To find a way out of this yearly mess, a 10-member committee headed by Lalit Gupta, Joint Director General, Directorate General of Civil Aviation, was set up. The Committee, which also has representation from the Indian Meteorological office, airlines and airports, is to look at ways to make Delhi a zero diversion airport, without compromising on the safety of aircraft. The committee has been asked to submit its report by the end of March this year.
But one thing that the Committee will find hard to overcome is that there’s no escaping the annual weather phenomenon that seems to work with clock-work precision ‘whitening-out’ north-west, central and east India in turns each time fog occurs. Flights as well as ground transport are thrown out of gear on an average for 15 days from mid-December as dense to very dense fog descends on the cities, reducing visibility drastically.
13/01/14 Vinson Kurian/Business Line
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Invariably passengers and those waiting to receive them at airports around the country were agitated as a journey, say between Delhi and Chennai that should have taken less than 3 hours was extended by several hours. Over 130 domestic and international flights recorded delays ranging between 30 minutes and three hours, and some had to be diverted to Jaipur, Ahmedabad and Lucknow.
To find a way out of this yearly mess, a 10-member committee headed by Lalit Gupta, Joint Director General, Directorate General of Civil Aviation, was set up. The Committee, which also has representation from the Indian Meteorological office, airlines and airports, is to look at ways to make Delhi a zero diversion airport, without compromising on the safety of aircraft. The committee has been asked to submit its report by the end of March this year.
But one thing that the Committee will find hard to overcome is that there’s no escaping the annual weather phenomenon that seems to work with clock-work precision ‘whitening-out’ north-west, central and east India in turns each time fog occurs. Flights as well as ground transport are thrown out of gear on an average for 15 days from mid-December as dense to very dense fog descends on the cities, reducing visibility drastically.
13/01/14 Vinson Kurian/Business Line
