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Chaos in airports, is fog to blame?
Published on Wed, Dec 13, 2006 at 21:34, Updated on Wed, Dec 13, 2006 at 21:44 in 
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New Delhi: Come December and it is the same story all over again of cancelled or delayed flights and harried passengers at the airports.
With no one accepting blame for the scenario, is it really the much-maligned fog that is causing all the trouble?
Tourism consultant, Vimal Kumar was supposed to deliver a lecture at the Jammu University on Wednesday but his flight first kept getting delayed and then got cancelled.
To top it all, only one runway was operational at the Palam Airport in Delhi because of which flights that were still taking off were all delayed.
So it may only be fashionable to blame the fog for all this chaos, but Kumar begs to differ. “I traveled by the same aircraft 15 days earlier from Jammu to Delhi. We were hanging up in the air for 35 minutes. The weather was all right but it was impossible to land because of the over conjunction. I personally feel that we are not ready for this type of air traffic for the time being,” he says.
The Aviation Industry in India might be booming with low cost airlines, but there are no new runways or airports to accommodate the increased traffic.
Besides that, private airlines too aren't heeding to warnings from the Civil Aviation Ministry. They haven't bothered to train their pilots for the CAT 3 B Instrument Landing System that facilitates landing and take off in poor visibility.
One-sixty-nine flights going to and from Mumbai were delayed and four got cancelled on Wednesday alone. Delhi was worse off with 333 flights being delayed and six being cancelled.
What makes matters worse is that low budget airlines also don't refund against cancellations or delays.
“We have mandated the airline that if they do not have sufficient number of CAT 2 complaint crew or CAT 3 complaint crew then some of their schedules which have been approved for the winters shall be curtailed,” says director general, Civil Aviation, Kanu Gohain.
Presently, only Indian Airlines and Kingfisher Airlines are CAT 111 B compliant.
So if you are taking a flight from mid-December to beginning February, cross check your flight timings not once but at least thrice and do come to the airport with truckloads of patience because God knows you'll need it.
With Rohit Chandravarkar in Mumbai and Shvetal Kamalapurkar in Bangalore.
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