Dense fog descended on the Capital early on Wednesday morning, reducing visibility to almost nil and severely affecting air traffic at Indira Gandhi International Airport here.
Visibility at the airport runway dipped to below 100 metres, forcing delays by up to five hours. While DIAL claimed that over 100 flights were delayed, an agency report put the number at over 200. There were also four cancellations.
The situation started to deteriorate after 1-40 a.m. when dense fog enveloped the airport, reducing the runway visibility to less than 100 metres. There were virtually no take-offs from 1-40 a.m. till around 9 a.m. as the runway visibility hovered between 75 and 100 metres.
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However, flights arriving here were able to land using the CAT-III B instrument landing system.
Four flights, two each of Jet Airways and SpiceJet, were diverted to Jaipur, Ahmedabad and Indore, an airport official said.
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The temperature also dropped with the minimum settling at 5.6 degrees Celsius, which was one degree below normal and almost half of Tuesday's minimum temperature of 9.3.
The maximum temperature was 15.5, which the weatherman said was five degrees below normal for this time of the year.
The bleak weather is likely to continue with the weatherman forecasting a further dip in minimum temperature. Thursday is likely to record 4 degrees Celsius and is likely to go up to 5 degrees Celsius on Friday. Six degrees Celsius has been forecast for the weekend. The maximum temperatures are likely to hover between 17 and 18 degrees Celsius. The Met Department has forecast fog on Thursday morning.
Rail passengers were also affected with the fog enveloping the Northern region. Services of over 50 trains were affected. The railways delayed the departure timings by more than two hours of 10 trains including four Rajdhanis and a Garibrath due to bad weather, a Northern Railway spokesperson.
As many as 39 trains were cancelled, while services of 14 were partially affected.