Bengaluru airport: Operations of 48 flights disrupted due to fog, low visibility

BENGALURU: Hundreds of passengers who were travelling out of the city ahead of Christmas were stranded at the

Kempegowda International Airport

in Bengaluru for hours after operations were briefly suspended between 6:30am and 7:30am, due to

fog

and low visibility conditions which persisted for nearly three hours--till 8:38am. Operations of 48 flights were disrupted while three incoming flights were diverted to other airports due to the same, said sources.


35 flights scheduled for departure and 13 flights scheduled for arrival were delayed due to fog while flights of three airlines-- Blue Dart, Indigo and SpiceJet were diverted. A Bengaluru-bound Blue Dart flight from Mumbai, an Indigo flight no: 6E521 from Kochi and a Spicejet flight SG 1035 from Hyderabad were diverted to the Chennai airport.

According to sources, the visibility standby declared by authorities at 5:31am was only withdrawn at 8:38am-- more than three hours later.

This is only the latest in a long string of fog-related delays in departures at the Bengaluru international airport. Earlier this month, on December 10, operations of 63 flights were disrupted due to fog conditions—45 flights scheduled for departure and 15 flights scheduled for arrival were delayed on that day. On November 27, meanwhile, operations at Kempegowda International Airport (KIA) were suspended for 14 minutes — between 6.32am and 6.48am —due to which 39 flight departures were delayed.

Several passengers, while speaking to TOI pointed out how many of them were stranded inside flights that were parked for hours together on the airport tarmac.

“My Indigo flight to Chennai was supposed to take off at 9:30am. However, boarding was delayed by 20 minutes. After boarding the flight, we were stranded inside the aircraft on the tarmac for nearly 1 hour and 20 minutes. The flight finally took off at 11:20am—nearly two hours after the scheduled time of departure,” said Susan Jacob, a passenger and resident of C V Raman Nagar.

Frustrated commuters, caught unwary by the suspension in operations, also took to social media platforms to complain.

“Right now I’m stranded at Bangalore airport my flight is getting delayed continuously should have reached Lucknow if it was in time,” wrote a passenger Gaurav Gupta, on Twitter, on Saturday morning.

With several flights getting delayed, long queues formed at the information counters and many passengers also complained about the airport being ‘overcrowded’, on Saturday.

Manipal

Global Education chairman T V Mohandas Pai wrote on Twitter “Bangalore airport, overcrowded, AC poor, queues in toilet, working much beyond capacity, slow expansion only by 2020 @jayantsinha Minister pl visit to review, we suffer from overcrowding, a apathetic management, bad rude customer service @DrParameshwara.”

While responding to Pai’s tweets, Bengaluru International Airport Limited (BIAL) authorities wrote “Dear Sir, noted and we are committed to working on the same. The increased load and traffic was due to the holiday season travel over the last 2-3 days.”

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