Mumbai: The country's second busiest airport, the Mumbai airport, has started the use of its cross runways for 24 hours, a facility till now used only to ease peak traffic.
It means the airport can now handle two extra landings and take-offs per hour. It also means that during peak hours take-off and landing delays will be cut.
But will the use of this additional runway really ease pressure?
It's going to mean additional work for the severely understaffed Air Traffic Controllers, which is already 20 per sent understaffed. And domestic departures will only use the shorter runway, which means more stress for fatigued pilots. They have to be extra careful not to overshoot the runway.
As monsoon arrives visibility at the airport sometimes will dip below 3,000 metres, which means the cross runway can't be used at all.
However, the reappointed minister Praful Patel has said that air safety will be top priority.
"I said priority number one is safety. We will do whatever possible to make the systems safer," he said.
Use of this additional runway can help Mumbai's growing traffic, but only if the authorities can reduce the margin for human errors. And that can't happen till our air-traffic controllers and pilots are under-trained and overworked.