Mumbai:
Flight operations at Mumbai International Airport were scaled down on Tuesday, after the runway was closed for six hours of repair work. However, part of the main runway remained operational.
The first flight to land since restricted runway operations began at 1:30 pm was Jet Airways' 9W 302 from Delhi. Scheduled to arrive at 11:35 am, the flight flew in at 1:38 pm.
Four minutes later, Kingfisher's IT 3571 to Patna became the first flight to take off during the limited runway operations. The flight was initially scheduled to depart two hours earlier.
The Mumbai International Airport Limited (MIAL) handed over the airport runway to Air Traffic Control (ATC) for operations at 06.12 pm.
Runway 0927 was later opened for operations and the first flight to land after operations normalised was Kingfisher IT 513 Goa-Mumbai at 06.16 pm.
In all, 12 flights were cancelled and four rescheduled due to the six-hour runway closure. This will be a recurring exercise between 12 noon and 6 pm on Tuesdays, for the next 22 weeks. The last time the runway was closed like this was six years ago in 2003.
Jet Airways & JetLite have decided to reschedule flights to and from Mumbai on Tuesdays.
Kingfisher that operates 31 domestic flights out of and into Mumbai has either changed flight timings or flight numbers on Tuesdays. It has also cancelled four domestic flights.
On the international route, the timings of flights operating on the Mumbai-London and Mumbai-Singapore sectors have been changed.