Fog gives BIA the shivers

Fog gives BIA the shivers

For the first time on Saturday, the six-month old Bengaluru International Airport experienced foggy weather, and operations came to a standstill for over three hours with no flights taking off or landing. More than two dozen flights were affected

Saurabh Yadav and Debi Prasad Sarangi
Posted On Sunday, November 09, 2008

Between 5:07 am and 8:31 am on Saturday morning, foggy weather paid its first visit to the six-month old Bangalore International Airport (BIA) and gave it a shiver or two. Operations at the airport came to a standstill for over three hours with no flights taking off or landing. More than two dozen flights were affected. Visibility at the airport was reduced to less than four metres. And those who had come to receive passengers were stranded in the visitors area of the terminal building; literally shivering.

“This is the first time I have seen such extreme foggy conditions here. It was too much to handle,” a BIA employee quipped.
Chaos ruled at the airport’s terminal building when outbound passengers rushed to obtain boarding passes; only to be informed about the delayed departures. With empty arrival terminals, passengers were seen waiting for hours. However, they had the privilege of SMS updates and phone calls.

For a lot of taxi drivers, it was an endless wait with their placards. Riyaz, a taxi driver, showed some ‘swalpa adjust maadi’ attitude by patiently and cheerfully waiting for his passenger. “This is normal during this season. We had got used to this at the old HAL airport... There are a lot of drivers waiting even longer than me. I can’t fight the weather,” he told Bangalore Mirror.

Those flying into Bangalore had no option but to go round in circles in the sky as their aircraft did not receive clearance to land. “My flight was 25 minutes late, because we were circling over the airport and unable to land,” said Indian Air Force official Kaushal, from Pune.

The first aircraft to land after the fog cleared was a Jet Airways flight 441 from Mumbai at 8:31 am. The first aircraft to take off was a Kingfisher flight 4429 to Kochi.

The thick blanket of fog also descended on Devanahalli and adjoining areas in North Bangalore, turning the drive to the airport into a nightmare. The deserted BIA road reminded of scenes from a horror movie. “Visibility was so low that my car driver took an hour extra to reach the airport from Marathahalli,” said a BIA employee. There were at least four accidents due to low visibility on the fast-lane to BIA.

With the weatherman forecasting foggy mornings for the next two months, driving on BIA road will only get tougher. “We might have intermittent days of foggy weather. But it will clear up during the course of the day. If the sky is clear and humidity is 100 per cent, we can expect fog the very next day,” a met department official