The national capital has had extreme cold over the past three days, with Sunday seeing the lowest minimum temperature of the winter season. Passengers at Delhi Airport are feeling uncomfortable in the heavy fog that is engulfing the city, as aircraft operations were halted on Sunday. According airport officials, roughly ten flights were diverted and over 100 had delays because of the thick fog’s poor visibility. This information was reported by the news agency PTI.
According to a PTI report citing sources, visibility at Indira Gandhi International Airport was almost nonexistent between 4 and 10 am, resulting in only 15 arrivals and no flight departures during that time.
According to the India Meteorological Department (IMD), the thick fog this season lasted the longest of any previous season.
Disruptions faced
IndiGo:
“Due to the low visibility and dense fog conditions across North India, IndiGo flight operations were impacted on January 14, 2024. This had a cascading effect on our operations throughout the day. Our staff kept passengers apprised of all delays and cancellations across airports and made every possible effort to facilitate the passengers. We sincerely regret the inconvenience caused to our passengers,” the airlines stated.
Air India:
Due to the heavy fog, one of Air India’s impacted flights at Delhi Airport—AI 185 to Vancouver—had to be rescheduled. Before disembarking, passengers had to wait for extended periods of time on the airplane. It was decided to reschedule the departure in accordance with flight duty timing regulations since the flight, which was initially scheduled to take off a little after 5:00 am, could not get airborne.
Vistara and Akasa Air:
Due to low visibility, Vistara advised of possible delays in arrivals and departures from Delhi. In a similar vein, Akasa Air recognized that bad weather in Delhi, Chennai, Varanasi, Bagdogra, and Lucknow had an impact on Sunday’s flight schedule and caused delays. The flights that were impacted were those from Bengaluru to Varanasi, Varanasi to Mumbai, Mumbai to Varanasi, and Varanasi to Bengaluru. Posts at 1:35 pm and 12:12 pm announced the cancellations.
Further updates
The weather department has issued an alert stating that a dense fog is likely to persist in isolated pockets of northwest India for the next three to four days, despite the continued freezing temperatures.
“Very dense fog layer extends over Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, North Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh. Passengers on highways need to drive extremely carefully and only with fog lights,” the IMD shared from its X handle.
“Journeys need to be halted until fog reduction by morning especially on expressways. Very Dense fog reporting over Amritsar, Chandigarh, Patiala, Ambala, Ganganagar, Palam, Safdarjung, Lucknow with visibility 0 meter since 0230 hrs IST of today,” it continued
