Heavy fog in northern metros causes flight delays in Chennai

V Ayyappan TNN

Dec 20, 2008

Chennai: If you are planning to fly in the coming weeks, be prepared for prolonged delays and unexpected diversions. Fog over Delhi, Kolkata, Hyderabad and Bangalore is throwing flight schedules awry at airports across the country. Though Chennai airport has not yet experienced poor visibility due to fog, several incoming flights from the four metros are delayed by 45-90 minutes every day. But departures are more or less on time as airlines are taking steps to contain the delays to the affected sectors, said an Airports Authority of India official. Frequent travellers and airport officials fear the worse is yet to come though the fog elsewhere has already started to have a cascading effect in Chennai. On Wednesday, a Chennai-Kolkata Kingfisher Red flight, which had a delayed departure, could not land at the Kolkata airport around midnight because of poor visibility. Chennai is also receiving a minimum of five to six diversions from Bangalore and Hyderabad on most days, said AAI. The once-popular early morning flights are not preferred by travellers this season. However, shoddy handling of the scenario by the airlines and also the airports might force travellers from deferring their travel plans or even depend on trains, said Air Passenger Association of India president D Sudhakara Reddy. “Fog affects flight schedules every year. Still, the airlines are not ready to rearrange the schedules. But if there is poor visibility at the destination, they prefer to fly back all the way so that they do not have to provide accommodation and refreshments to passengers,” he said. According to sources, AAI and the airlines were equally responsible for the delays. Hyderabad and Bangalore have CAT III (an instrument landing system that guides landing in very poor visibility) enabled runways. But, they are not able to use them because of a technical problem created by AAI that controls navigation. Delhi and Mumbai airports too have CAT III but some of the airlines do not either have aircraft equipped to handle the instrument landing system or pilots trained to handle them. However, a senior Jet Airways official said that most of the modern aircraft were CAT III compatible. “Airlines take precaution while flying to fogaffected destinations. Only pilots trained to handle such landings are allowed to fly. More fuel is carried to prepare for diversions. A trend analysis is also done about the weather pattern before scheduling flights.” “The schedule gets affected because during foggy days, the distance between one aircraft and another is increased from 12 to 16 miles,” said a pilot. Chennai is currently experiencing good visibility of 3,000 ft while just 800 ft is enough for aircraft operations.