Flight ops at Patna airport hit due to dense fog

PATNA: As low visibility conditions continue to disrupt schedule at the Patna airport, two flights each of IndiGo and SpiceJet could not take off due to fog late on Monday evening. On Tuesday, the first flight landed at 11.58 am, owing to poor visibility.
With the minimum runway visual range visibility dropping below 500m at 9 pm on Monday, SpiceJet’s SG 768 Bengaluru to Patna was diverted to Kolkata first, however, it reached Patna at 9.45 but the flight (SG-767) could not take off for Bengaluru, forcing its passengers to spend the night at the airport.IndiGo’s flight 6E- 5373 Mumbai-Patna also failed to operate due to bad weather. Both flights left the city for its destination on late Tuesday afternoon.
Irked by the cancellation, several flyers vented their anger on social media. One flyer Siddharth wrote on Twitter, “Extremely chaotic situation at Patna Airport. Now SG 767 has been called cancelled. No alternate solution provided by the airlines (sic).”
Another flyer, Rahul Kumar, who hails from Jehanabad said he spent the night at Patna airport as he got no accommodation in Patna. “No arrangement was made by SpiceJet for the passengers. The IndiGo airlines provided a facility to stay for their passengers, but we were left on our own to deal with the situation as if it was our fault. The flight departed on Tuesday at 1 pm for Bengaluru,” he complained.
The airport’s deputy general manager (air traffic management), Santosh Kumar said two flights were diverted on Monday due to fog while the flight operations were also affected on Tuesday morning owing to poor visibility.
According to weathermen at the Patna Meteorological Centre, the minimum visibility dropped to 50metre at 8.30 am while it was around 500m at 10 am and 600m at 11 am on Tuesday. “The required RVR visibility of 1,000m (800m general visibility) was achieved after 11.30 am and the flight operations started at 11.50 am,” a weatherman Kamal Singh Gupta said.
IndiGo’s 6E- 345 between Bengaluru and Patna was the first flight that arrived at the city airport at 11.58 am, which was supposed to reach at 11.35 am. While six flights before 6E-345 were re-scheduled and landed after 12.30 pm.
According to airport sources, altogether 27 flights out of 43 were delayed due to bad weather in Patna, some flights encountered minor delays. Total 11 flights suffered more than two hours delay including SpiceJet’s SG- 8741 from Delhi, which landed at Patna airport at 2.41 pm, which was scheduled to reach for 8.20 am. The other flights include seven of SpiceJet (Guwahati, Chennai, Mumbai-2, Pune, Amritsar and Hyderabad) two each of IndiGo (Mumbai and Delhi) and GoAir (Delhi). Around 12 flights got delayed by one hour.
The delay of arriving flights led to bunching of aircraft affecting their departures and the other scheduled flights as well.