Tuesday blues were back for travellers at the Mumbai airport as once again the airport’s main runway — 09-27 — was shut for six hours from 10am to 4pm.
Tuesday blues were back for travellers at the Mumbai airport as once again the airport’s main runway — 09-27 — was shut for six hours from 10am to 4pm.
s repair work was undertaken on the runway, several flights were delayed for more than 30 minutes while there were two go-arounds and one diversion.
Flight operations at the Mumbai airport, which is one of the busiest in the country, had normalised just three weeks back after six months of instability. But on Tuesday, passengers once again had to put up with innumerable delays.
“We are closing the main runway to carry out important repair works,” said the spokesperson for Mumbai International Airport Limited (MIAL). According to sources, the intersection point of taxiway N9 and runway 27 of the 09-27 has developed cracks and so needs urgent repairs. Thus, the secondary runway 14-32 was used and had to accommodate the extra flights from the main runway.
“The runway occupancy time of an aircraft on 14-32 is more and this definitely caused delays,” said an airport official. Most arrivals and departures were delayed by more than 30 minutes and one Air India flight in the afternoon was diverted to Ahmedabad due to tailwind on runway 14-32.
Also, runway 14-32 is usually used only by domestic flights as international airlines like Saudi Airways and Singapore Airlines have bigger aircraft, which find it difficult to land on it. The reason being; they find the air traffic control (ATC) tower obstructing their approach path to the runway.
“As a result Singapore Airlines flight, which was to arrive at 10.30am at Mumbai, was rescheduled and it landed at 10am on the main runway. After that the runway was closed,” said the MIAL spokesperson.
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