Welcome to Sahar, please queue up!

But that was not to be. Three and a half hours later, she staggered out of the arrival lounge, nauseous and in a cold sweat. Asmita had been hijacked by a stubborn conveyor belt, chased after vanishing baggage trolleys and queued up almost endlessly for niggling customs, emigration and security checks.

The jetlagged passenger disembarking at Sahar airport during the wee hours is almost instantly dispatched onanother harrowing journey, which begins at the conveyor belts near the Customs clearance counters and doesn’t end even after they exit. Pre-paid taxis which fail to turn up and insolent police officials are determined to make their trip a truly unforgettable experience.

Apart from truant airport equipment, Asmita found herself surrounded by a swarm of passengers who had flown in on one British Airways, two Air-India, one Cathay Pacific and one Swiss Air flight, which landed within a span of 10-15 minutes.

Landing of international flights peaks between midnight and 4 am, with an average of 10 airlines disgorging their passengers minutes apart. The situation is worse on Wednesdays and Fridays, when air traffic is at its peak.

With the seating of long-haul aircraft accommodating around 300-400 passengers, thousands of people disembark almost simultaneously. The arrival lounge is a bustling sea of humanity and the archaic luggage handling conveyor belt system only compounds the agony. Even during peak hoursonly two of the four belts are operational.

Captain Ayodh Kapoor, a retired Air-India commander, who heads the Federation of Indian Pilots, a body of professionals engaged in improving flight safety in the country, testifies to the trauma. He says his baggage is affixed with a priority tag, which means it is one of the first pieces of luggage to be offloaded. “But at Mumbai airport, the priority tag means you are bound to collect it last – it is offloaded first, but by the time it reaches the belts, it is buried under loads of other baggage and it takes at least 45 minutes to collect it,” Kapoor explains.

Then, another long wait begins – this time for a trolley. Though Airports Authority of India (AAI) officials claim there are around 3,000 trolleys at the arrival terminal “at any given time of the day,” passengers tell quite a different story.

The pre-paid taxi scheme, he says, is equally frustrating. “I headed for the pre-paid taxi counter and got the bill of fare. I waited nearly 10 minutes forthe cab allotted to me, but it never turned up.”

Capt Kapoor then approached two policemen but was asked to mind his own business. “Finally I walked down endless rows of taxis and woke up the driver of my cab,” he says.

“The AAI recovers Rs 750 per passenger as service charge but the facilities at the airport are simply not worth it,” he rues.

Airport Director, R J Treasurywala, however, promises a sea-change within two months. “The AAI has already begun work on the Rs 9-crore Common User Terminal Equipment (CUTE), the latest operating system developed by SITA, the global telecommunications and information services. When this is operational, the Sahar airport will have state-of-the-art conveyor belts at both the arrival and departure lounges,” he says.

“Other terminal infrastructure will be also be optimised so that passengers can approach any counter for emigration checks, instead of queueing up at a dedicated counter for a particular airline,” he adds.

However, he points out, the AAI isnot responsible for rude cabbies as the pre-paid taxi service is handled by the Regional Transport Authority of the state government and the traffic police.