NEW DELHI:
Fog in Delhi
sent
flight schedules
across several cities into a tailspin on Monday through a blizzard of cancellations and delays that left thousands stranded at airports and even inside planes.
Mumbai took the hit the second day in a row, with 25 arrivals and 31 departures cancelled till 8pm. Over 20 flights were delayed in Bengaluru. Pune reported six cancellations and several delays.
So prolonged was the fog impact that passengers of an IndiGo Delhi-Kolkata (6E 389) flight that was to depart at 9.15pm on Monday were stuck inside the plane on the tarmac for several hours. The pilot supposed to fly the plane from Delhi's T1 terminal landed at the T2 terminal, having just steered his previous flight from Bengaluru several hours late as schedules were in disarray.
The fog effect travelled far. One of them was coastal holiday hub Goa, where at least six flights had to be cancelled, two of them to Delhi, and many more were delayed. Distant Kerala suffered, too, with flights from Delhi delayed five to six hours. In Kolkata, 21 arrivals and 20 departures had to be cancelled. Of these, four departures and four arrivals were direct flights to and from Delhi. Kolkata itself experienced fog early Monday, delaying nearly 100 flights. Amid the chaos, Jaipur became an oasis, receiving eight planes diverted from Delhi, three of them from abroad. In Lucknow, two flights connecting Delhi were cancelled, apart from one to Indore. Ten flights were cancelled in Patna, including two to Delhi. In Chandigarh, six flights were cancelled and 32 delayed. In Bhopal, two Delhi-linked flights were cancelled.
In Nagpur, two flights to Delhi were cancelled. Ahmedabad saw around 10 cancellations and over 50 delays. In Ranchi, several flights to Delhi were cancelled and those headed to other cities rescheduled as a result of the fog in the capital. Guwahati, Bhubaneswar and Dehradun came out relatively unscathed from the chaos, with flight schedules largely unaffected in these cities.
English (US) ·