Fog Fully paralyzed Delhi

By Siddharth Bhum

Delhi Airport Closed For 5 Hours On Monday, Similar Situation Predicted For Tuesday

The season’s thickest fog hit Delhi late on Sunday night, throwing air schedules haywire and once again exposing the aviation ministry’s hollow claims of being prepared for the annual mess. The Delhi airport was virtually closed from 5.30 am to 11 am as visibility was hovering below 100 metres.

This had a cascading effect all day long — and possibly will extend on Tuesday too — with 19 flights being cancelled and almost all the 650-odd flights that operate from IGI daily being delayed by anywhere from one to eight hours.

The worst part, however, is yet to come. The Met department has predicted a similar fog situation for Tuesday. With fog setting in by 8 pm on Monday, there was a possibility that flights that had left the city during the day might not be able to return due to low visibility problems.

Secondly, with almost 80-90% of the pilots who flew on Monday having spent most of their working hours sitting in the cockpit, waiting for clearance to take-off, they exhausted their flight duty limitations. On Tuesday, therefore, airlines were worried about the non-availability of pilots, especially the CAT III trained ones.

Meanwhile from 5.30 am to 11 am on Monday, only eight flights — eight international and two domestic — could land using the highly sophisticated CAT III B system that allows planes to land when visibility goes between 75 and 100 metres.

Low visibility procedures were in place for 11 hours and 35 minutes — from 1.10 am to 12.45 pm, making it the longest ever single stretch of dense fog in past two years. While visibility started improving after 11 am, the huge backlog with a majority of flights not being CAT III B compliant meant a massive problem for passengers.

“We entered the cockpit at 7 am and then had to call in passengers as just to line up for take off with ATC we need to tell them our boarding’s complete and the doors are closed,” said a pilot giving another reason for why passengers had to remain in planes for hours together.

With schedules going completely haywire during the morning hours, flights all through the day were affected, specially since there was fog over most of the north region. The chaos synonymous with fog related delays was missing outside the airport with most passengers made to board the aircraft much before take-off. However, the cramped terminal 1B was still bursting at the seams. Passengers getting no space to sit despite an increased security hold area, had to make do with luggage trolleys. At the terminal, the information display system went off for about half an hour during which time there was complete chaos as no information on arrivals was forthcoming from airlines.