In an attempt to cut flight delays,the Ministry of Civil Aviation has released a list of repeat offenders. The Mumbai airport is the most congested in the country and the list reveals that many of these flights operating in and out of the city are late nearly every day. We want to monitor flight operations and find out why there are delays, said Alok Sinha,Joint Secretary,Civil Aviation. The airport and the ministry are expected to draw a similar list each month and over a period of time,a trend will be identified to figure out the flights that are repeatedly late. The list has been drawn up for flights that are late for a minimum of 20 per cent of the time,which could start from as little as 15 minutes to much longer delays. In all,188 flights arriving into and 134 flight departing from Mumbai were repeatedly late in April. The average flight movements per day at Mumbai airport is around 740 around 370 departures and 370 arrivals of commercial airlines. If the flight is late on 30 of 31 days,obviously there is some problem, said an airport official. For Jet Airways,9W 2050 from Ahmedabad arriving at Mumbai was late 27 of 28 times it operated in April,9W 212 coming from Kolkata was late 26 of 29 times,from Delhi 9W 380 was late 14 of 19 times. For Kingfisher,IT 312 from Delhi was late on 25 of 27 days,IT 320 was late on 26 of 30 days coming from Delhi. IT 3142 from Bhubaneshwar was late on 29 of 30 days. In the case of Air India,AI 866 from Goa was late 25 of 26 days it operated. AI 612 from Jaipur was late 26 of 27 times. Indigos 6 E 177 was late on 25 of 30 days coming from Delhi. SG 894 from Delhi was late on 30 of 31 days. G8 244 from Ahmedabad was late on 22 days of 30. S 2-324 from Ahmedabad was late on 25 of 28 days. When the process for drawing the next schedule comes up,the flights that are repeatedly late stand the chance of losing the slot altogether,the ministry said. It is difficult to say if passengers will avoid late flights as most go by the fare and time schedule. A majority of passengers book a flight and then hope it will be on time. Let them plot the trend over six months,then a clear picture might emerge, said Milan Zatakia,a frequent flier,who heads Millenium Aero Dynamics. The reasons for delays are various and efforts to improve on-time performance of flights have been going on since last year as airlines were told to stick to their slot timings for arrivals and departures. But even now,flights hover over Mumbai for over 40 minutes, an airline official said. He added that the limited runway infrastructure (Mumbai has only one runway),taxiway infrastructure,allocation of parking bays make a difference to on-time performance. Mumbai International Airport Limited (MIAL) spokesperson said it could not comment about the list. Air India is constantly engaged in ensuring that guidelines are met for maintaining on-time performance of flights. We are focussing on that and all efforts are being made to achieve it, said an Air India spokesperson. Spokespersons for Kingfisher Airlines and SpiceJet did not comment on the issue,while the Indigo spokesperson did not return calls. Jet Airways spokesperson did not revert with a comment despite e-mail queries.
