Flights delayed and diverted, trains suspended and vehicles got stuck on
water-logged roads
Passengers who wish to fly during monsoon should be prepared for a delay of at least 30 minutes to maximum 3 hours. The late evening showers on Friday caused 13 flight diversions from Mumbai thereby leading to much chaos.
On Friday evening, Falguni Goghari, an architect from Santacruz realised how rain can play havoc with her flying schedule in the next few months. Goghari was on a Kingfisher flight from Ahmedabad to Mumbai that was to land in Mumbai at 12.05pm at night. But she reached Mumbai a good two hours late and had to experience various difficulties for another two hours before she could make it
at home by 4.30 in the morning on Saturday.
“After half an hour, the pilot told us that we will be circling the Mumbai skies for an hour as the weather is bad,” she says. “It was only at 2.30am that the flight landed in Mumbai.” But her woes were not over after she come out of terminal 1A, Santacruz, Mumbai airport. “I had to wait in a long queue for another hour to get a rickshaw as the cabbies and rickshaw drivers simply refused to take passengers,” she says. It was only around 3.15am that a driver agreed to take her and her daughter to Santacruz and asked for Rs100 while the meter came to only Rs22.
The spokesperson for Mumbai International Airport Limited (MIAL) confirmed that due to bad weather, the Air Traffic Control (ATC) diverted 13 flights. “We had to divert these flights to Ahmedabad, Pune, Chennai and Hyderabad due to rains,” said an ATC official.
s_naveeta@dnaindia.net
