Fliers heading out of the city for their year-end break have had to face delays with the heavy fog in Delhi holding up incoming flights, leading to a cascading effect.
Flights in Delhi were operating at the airport under CAT III B conditions, which meant the runway visual range was between 50 m and 175 m. Officials at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport said heavy fog across north India led to flight disruptions with multiple flights to and from Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai being delayed or even cancelled.
In a statement, IndiGo said, “Owing to dense fog in North India, our flights have been impacted across India. We will continue to review the situation and provide real-time updates on our social media platforms.” The airline requested passengers to check flight status before leaving home and reach out to its customer care.
Vistara said on Twitter its Delhi-Mumbai flight UK933 and Mumbai-Delhi flight UK996 were cancelled due to poor visibility in the Capital. Vistara along with GoAir, SpiceJet and AirAsia India said due to fog and poor visibility in Delhi, their operations might be impacted. They advised passengers to check their flight status before leaving for the airport.
An example of the cascading effect was that SpiceJet’s SG-6374 (Siliguri-Mumbai), SG-6282/83 (Mumbai-Cochin-Mumbai) and SG-6710 (Mumbai-Delhi) were delayed as they were operated by the same aircraft. The Swedish aircraft and airport tracking website Flightradar24 said 240 departures from Mumbai were delayed, while 14 were cancelled.
Among the delayed departures were IndiGo flight 6E-215, which instead of its 4.30 p.m. departure, only took off at 8.45 p.m. The aircraft was first delayed by an hour in Guwahati followed by Kolkata for over two hours. An Air India spokesperson who was flying to Delhi from Mumbai said, “The weather in the national Capital is too bad. Most of the outbound flights from Delhi have been affected. The consequence can been seen in Mumbai.”
