Mumbai airport clocks 969 flights in a day

Mumbai's Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport (CSIA) on Friday clocked 969 aircraft movement, which is the highest figure so far in the aerodrome's history. The GVK group-run CSIA is counted amongst world's busiest single-runway facilities which on an average handles 837 flights a day or one in 65 seconds on an average in fiscal 2017, taking over London's Gatwick airport that had 757 flights a day. However, there are days when the aircraft movement crosses even 900 movements a day, an airport official said.

All the leading cities like New York, London, Dubai, and Singapore have more than one airports with multiple runways. The New Delhi airport has three parallel runways in use at any given time.

As against this, Mumbai has to make do with a single runway for all passenger and cargo aircraft and when it is shut for repairs, it uses the secondary runway. The ATC (air traffic controller) thus has to manage two arrivals every 130 seconds and one departure in between these two arrivals. So there is one take-off or touch-down every 65 seconds from the main runway. That means the land-starved airport handled a whopping 837 flight movements a day, which on an average is 80 flights more than Gatwick handling 757 movements in a day, a CSIA official said.