Lesser delays as on time performance of flights goes up

Since last July,the ministry,DGCA,MIAL and the Air Traffic Control have been coordinating to improve efficiency at the airport and bring down levels of air traffic congestion in Mumbai. As a part of this drive and to enforce departure discipline,a rule was enforced whereby all flights had to start pushback — the aircraft left the bay to queue up on the runway 15 minutes before departure time.

Around 10 flights that routinely missed this deadline in the summer schedule were penalised and not given their slots in the winter schedule. Overall,25 flights from all airports missed their slots in the winter schedule because of repeated departure delays. “We want to keep a close eye on flights that are late on a regular basis,” Sinha said.

However,airport officials said despite all measures,the OTP at Mumbai is not expected to drastically improve this year because of infrastructure constraints.

The Mumbai airport’s main runway is under renovation from 9 am to 5 pm on week days. “Flights were slotted for the main runway but the secondary runway,with a slightly lesser capacity per hour,is in use for the major part of the day. The airport also can’t have simultaneous runway operations at this time. These are inherent infrastructure problems which are bound to cause flight delays,” said an airport official. “If there are tail winds on the secondary runway,delays increase significantly,” he added.

The airport is currently looking at improving the capacity of the runway to cater to more flights by getting UK’s air traffic service provider NATS to conduct a capacity enhancement study. It aims to increase air traffic movement to 48 flights per hour from an average of 34 flights an hour currently.