Runway shutdown at Mumbai airport affects 255 flights
Operation of around 255 flights was affected on Wednesday because of a sixhour closure of both the runways at the Mumbai Airport on account of repair and maintenance work, officials said. The primary and the secondary runways at the country’s second busiest airport were shut down from 11 am to 5 pm, they said.
The operations were normalised after 5 pm, they said.
The Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport handles around 1,000 flights a day on an average. Mumbai International Airport Limited (MIAL), the joint venture company that runs the airport here, is undertaking maintenance and repair of the runways in two phases.
The Airports Authority of India has a 26 per cent stake in MIAL while GVK Group-led consortium holds a majority of 74 per cent stake.
The first phase of the work was scheduled for this month and the next one will be carried out between February 7 and March 30 next year from 11am to 5 pm on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.
“At least 255 flights were affected at the Mumbai airport because of the six-hour shut down of both the runways to carry out the repair and maintenance work,” a senior official of AAI said.
The airlines had been intimated in advance about the runway closure period, and accordingly they had rescheduled some of the flights, the official said. Some impact was bound to be there, the official added.
“Most of the airlines accommodated passengers either in their morning or evening flights by combining flights. This negated any major impact on their operations,” an official of the MIAL said. “At the time of the stakeholders meeting, we had also requested some of the airlines to deploy bigger aircraft well,” the official said. The two runways on an an average handle 40-43 flights per hour during the lean hours (11am-5pm), the official said.