Air congestion caused due to the presence of fog is making news now for the wrong reasons.
On Monday, 30th December many people were affected between Delhi and Chennai flight route due to the air-congestion caused by heavy fog in Delhi. There was a delay of as many as 28 flights between the above-said places. As a result, flights to other places of destinations in India were also affected badly.
It is worthy to note that in Chennai as many as 14 arrivals from Delhi and 14 departures to Delhi were delayed and a flight to Bengaluru from Chennai was cancelled. Information collected is 5 flights from Bengaluru, Kolkata, Mumbai and Hyderabad were cancelled. The truth is many of the early morning flights from Delhi touched Chennai only in the evening.
The poor visibility in places like Delhi, Gwalior, Varanasi, Jaipur airports was responsible for the disruption of flights. To ply to multiple destinations, domestic aircraft use single aircraft and this has resulted in the subsequent delay of flights to places like Mumbai, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Patna, Bengaluru etc. On Sunday night, delay in flights from Delhi started.
It must be noted that airlines like IndiGo, Spicejet, Vistara, and Air India issued an advisory to the passengers and have warned them to check the flight schedules on the social media platforms of the airlines before reaching the airport. Popular airlines, IndiGo had tweeted about the delay in the flights due to the fog in northern parts of India and had asked the passengers to check the status before leaving their homes.
In the same manner, other airlines also tweeted about the impact of fog and the flight delays etc. The truth is many airlines do not have sufficiently trained pilots to handle the low visibility landings though the Delhi airport is equipped to handle this. The visibility was not good at Jaipur and hence the airlines also delayed the flights to Delhi. All pilots must be trained to handle low visibility landing and for this, the director-general of civil aviation must insist. This was as per Mr D.Sudakara Reddy, national president, APAI