Behind airport crowd surge: Bunching of foreign flight arrivals around the same time

Notably, in certain two-hour blocks like 10 am to 12 pm, only three flights arrived in Delhi and only one flight arrived in Mumbai, according to information sourced from flight tracking portal Flightradar24.

In a tweet on Tuesday, Civil Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia wrote: “Took stock of the preparedness, testing capacities, and the situation on the ground with regard to crowd management at both private and Airports Authority of India airports. Have put an action plan with 8 compliances on immigration queues, expanding RT-PCR service providers ramping up help desks & forex counters, along with seamless floor management. Rest assured, Ministry of Civil Aviation is monitoring the situation on a daily basis & passengers shall not face any inconvenience at airports”.

Close to a week after new guidelines came into effect at the Delhi airport against the backdrop of a new Covid variant, international passengers continued to complain of chaos, crowding, and long wait times to get tested. (Express Video by Abhinav Saha)https://t.co/xGQWerFHnN pic.twitter.com/ZT5XlbhtC8

— Express Delhi-NCR 😷 (@ieDelhi) December 6, 2021

The bunching of flights in certain time blocks is in line with the pre-pandemic practice of international flights arrivals but the air-bubble arrangements presented an opportunity for spaced-out scheduling of flights. In Delhi, 78 international passenger flights arrived on Monday, compared to around 170 flights per day in December 2019. The December 2019 data is sourced from the Airports Authority of India, and comprises all international aircraft arrivals including passenger, cargo and chartered flights. Similarly, for Mumbai, there were 51 international passenger flight arrivals on Tuesday, compared with 117 arrivals in December 2019.

Airline executives pointed out that it is a difficult task for airports to reschedule international flights given that — firstly, when the number of international flights during a day reduces, the frequency of domestic flights increases, and second the slot allocation also depends on availability of take-off slots for airlines in the origin country.

An e-mail query sent to Delhi International Airport Ltd (DIAL) went unanswered.

Responding to a set of queries sent by The Indian Express, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport (CSMIA) said: “International flight timings are dependent on the airline’s network schedule and several other factors of which the airport is just one. Most international flights arrive in India in the late hours of the night or in the early morning hours owing to various constraints like curfews hours at European airports. Of the international flights that arrive between midnight and 8am, only 3 or 4 flights are from the ‘at-risk’ countries. Therefore, there is no such ‘bunching of international flights’.”

“Over recent weeks, manpower at CSMIA’s Immigration counters for departure and arrival has been significantly increased. This has brought down the average queueing time at International Arrival/Departure from 20-25 minutes to 10-12 minutes. For health and safety, we have set up 100 Registration Counters and 68 Sampling Booths, as well as 178 Rapid PCR machines. With this, our testing capacity has increased to 456 tests per hour. Further, we have arranged a waiting area sufficient for 800 passengers, which has been equipped with adequate washrooms, food and beverage facilities, Wi-Fi connectivity, foreign exchange services and adequate passenger service executives,” the airport, operated by the Adani Group, added.

Following reports of crowding at airports and the government’s intervention, DIAL CEO Videh Kumar Jaipuriar said on Monday: “Delhi Airport has been making continuous enhancements in infrastructure and processes to manage the new screening norms for passengers arriving from at-risk countries”.