President’s aircraft, tyre burst hold up flights

VVIP protocol, an industrialist’s jet lead to delays at Santacruz airport

Mumbai: Tuesday was a day of congestion at Mumbai airport, with a number of factors to blame. To begin with, the movement of President Ramnath Kovind’s VVIP aircraft affected air traffic. This was followed by the tyre of a private jet bursting on the main runway, leading to a cascading effect which saw flight diversions, a go-around and flight delays.

Airport officials said the VVIP movement was at around 11 a.m., when President Kovind arrived in the city for an event at Goregaon. As per protocol, the President’s Indian Air Force aircraft was given priority by Air Traffic Control and other aircraft movement was restricted.

At around 12.15 p.m., officials said a nine-seater private jet, owned by a leading industrialist, suffered a tyre burst while landing. The runway had to be closed for flight operations for six minutes during which two Jet Airways flights were diverted to Ahmedabad and Vadodara, an Iran Air flight had to carry out a go-around (abort landing and make a second attempt) and a Jet Airways flight to Goa had to abort take-off.

“There was a 30-minute delay due to the aircraft suffering a tyre burst. This came down to 10 minutes by evening,” an ATC official said. In a message to passengers, Jet Airways said flights to and from Mumbai were facing a 30-minute delay till 5 p.m. The VVIP movement exercise was repeated during the departure of President Kovind a little after 2 p.m.

However, delays continued late into the evening, affecting flights which depended on aircraft stuck in Mumbai. Abhimanyu Singh, who was on an Indigo 6E-564 from Hyderabad to Delhi was told the flight was delayed by over an hour and that the 9.10 p.m. flight would only leave by 10.45 p.m. “The flight is facing delay due to air traffic congestion at Mumbai airport,” Indigo said in response to a Tweet by Mr. Singh.

Jet Airways faced a similar issue with its Kolkata-Delhi flight 9W-497, which reported a one-hour delay after being caught up in Mumbai due to air traffic congestion.

Private air traffic monitoring site, Flightradar24, said Mumbai reported an average arrival delay of 29 minutes translating to a 77% delay in arriving flights. On the departures side, the website said Mumbai recorded a 54-minute average departure delay, translating to 93% of flight departures being delayed and 7% of planned departures being cancelled as well. At 9.30 p.m., the website said the speed of arrivals was improving while departure delays were increasing.