Almost 3,000 flights delayed in a week from Mumbai Airport

Around 3,000 international and domestic flights arriving or departing from Mumbai airport were delayed in the past one week as the Airport Authorities of India (AAI) is upgrading the runway equipment known as the instrument landing system (ILS). The ILS helps pilots with navigation while landing at the airport. In the same period, there were several cancellations and diversions too.

The runway equipment upgrade work is expected to continue up to June 5. However, the number of flights getting affected has come down in the past two days. "Wednesday and Thursday were better than the previous days," an airport official said. "There will be improvement in terms delays going down in the coming days at the airport."

According to Flightradar 24, the air traffic monitoring portal, on Thursday, around 55 arriving flights were delayed up to 8.15 pm as compared to overall 173 arriving flights delayed on Wednesday. Furthermore, around 220 departing flights were delayed on Thursday up to 8.15 pm compared to 348 on Wednesday.

On Wednesday and Thursday, the delay gap for most of the flights was under 30 minutes compared to previous days when there was an average delay between 40 minutes to 90 minutes.

Mumbai airport is the second busiest airport in the country and handles around 950 flights daily. It has also reached its saturation point wherein the passenger traffic has increased over 100 per cent in the last eleven years.