After a day’s respite, thick fog enveloped the city airport today, causing one of the worst disruptions in air traffic this season, during which schedules of over 200 flights were disrupted including 50 cancellations.
Fifty flights (48 domestic and 2 international) were cancelled and 25 others (18 domestic and 7 international) were diverted to Jaipur, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Kolkata and Lucknow.
Also, 26 flights (24 domestic and 2 international) were rescheduled and several others delayed by up to six hours.
Flight operations remained suspended for about two hours. Later, 27 flights landed using the CAT-IIIB instrument landing system, which allows only CAT-IIIB compliant aircraft to land, even when the runway visibility is around 50 metres.
Moreover, as the limit for low visibility take-off (LVTO) has been reduced to 150 metres, no flights were taking off from early morning, since the runway visibility hovered between 50 metres to 75 metres for over five hours.
This led to congestion at the airport and no parking bay was available for inbound aircraft, resulting in diversion of some flights to other cities, airport officials said.
Fog descended at the airport early this morning and reduced the runway visibility from 1,000 metres to 100 metres within an hour.
It led to the implementation of low visibility procedures (LVP) around 5.06 am on the new runway (29/11), while it was implemented at 4.45 am on the main runway (28/10).
The LVP was terminated around 1.20 pm on the new runway while on the main runway, it was terminated around 12.16 pm.
During the LVP, a total of 78 flights operated of which 24 used CAT-I ILS, 25 with CAT-II and just two with CAT-III A ILS, an airport official said.
According to the Met Department, the fog started to descend on the airport in the wee hours and it began to thicken around 5 am, reducing the general visibility to less than 50 metres while runway visibility was reduced to around 250 metres.
The situation remained till 11 am, after which runway visibility improved and flights started to take off.
