Sunday, January 4, 2009

Passengers Stranded as Fog Plays Truant


Distraught Passengers stranded at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA) continued to have a harrowing time on Sunday as some 20 flights were cancelled and nearly 100 domestic and international airlines were forced to delay flights due to a heavy blanket of fog descended over the national capital.

With the skies relatively clear, airlines strived to clear an earlier backlog of flights, pushing for the reschedule of 13 flights and diverting nearly 10 (eight domestic and two international) to Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Jaipur.

Similar scenes were witnessed at Amritsar, Leh, Kullu, Patna, Lucknow airports as poor visibility and bad weather forced the delay, cancellation or merger of several flights.

Airlines combined their early morning flights due to low passenger load and in anticipation of fog, which has disarrayed flight operations since Monday.

"We have combined three morning flights due to low passenger load and also to ensure availability of aircraft at the other airports for smooth operations," a spokesperson of an airline was quoted as saying by PTI.

Over 600 flights were delayed and about 100 cancelled this week due to dense fog which enveloped the national capital almost every alternate day.

Fliers to Leh, in Ladakh, were a harassed lot as their flight was continuously cancelled for the third consecutive day on Sunday due to inclement weather at Leh.

The delays, cancellations and merger of flights caused inconvenience to the passengers, who complained that reworked schedules were not communicated to them in advance.

A dense fog cover on Saturday delayed about 150 flights and resulted in the cancellation of 21 others as the runway visibility range (RVR) dipped to 500 metres for the new runway.

The Low Visiblity Procedures were finally terminated after 16 hours and three minutes at 1208 hours Sunday afternoon, when RVR improved to 1400 metres.

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