Kolkata airport reopens an hour early: Long queues mark end of 13-hour closure
Telegraph | 26 October 2024
The city’s airport resumed operations on Friday morning, 13 hours after flight movements were suspended on Thursday evening as a precaution against Cyclone Dana.
The airport reopened at 8am on Friday and IndiGo’s flight to Imphal was the first to take off, at 8.40.
The first to land — at 8.45am — was Vistara’s flight from Delhi.
The flight operations were suspended at 7pm on Thursday. The prediction of strong crosswinds — up to 80km an hour — led to the shutdown. Around 300 flights, domestic and international, were cancelled.
This newspaper reported on Friday how airfares to and from Calcutta on many routes became exorbitantly high because of the rush to rebook seats by passengers of cancelled flights.
“We opened the airport at 8am, instead of 9am as was announced earlier, because many fliers had turned up,” said an airport official.
The gates of the airport’s terminal building at the departure level had long queues. A steady stream of cars and app cabs made their way to the airport even as it rained continuously and a sizeable number of fliers headed straight to the DigiYatra kiosks outside the gates.
Rows of luggage trolleys secured on Thursday with ropes were unshackled in the morning and the usual buzz was back.
The passenger information boards, which on Thursday evening displayed the list of flights cancelled, were back to showing real-time updates of all the flights scheduled to take off and land.
At the arrival level, too, things looked their usual self. Even taxi touts were back in action.
Sonam Yangchen, who was booked on a flight to Paro in Bhutan, said she left her hotel on Park Street for the airport at 4am.
“I was apprehensive of traffic snarls because of the rain, so I started early. I reached well within time but there were long queues at the entrance to the terminal,” said Yangchen, who had come to the city on a business trip.
Joel Joseph, a businessman from Mumbai who was in the city for the past three months to oversee a real estate project, said he had to pay more than ₹13,000 for a one-way flight to Mumbai.
“Generally a one-way ticket to Mumbai from Calcutta costs around ₹7,000-8,000. Last night, when I was looking for options, ₹13,000 was the cheapest one-way fare from Calcutta to Mumbai,” said Joseph.
On Thursday, the terminal building looked deserted after 7.30pm as flights were suspended and the gates sealed.
The taxi bay had emptied out and only those who worked at the airport stayed back.
A US Bangla flight from Dhaka could not land in Calcutta because of heavy rain and poor visibility and flew back to the Bangladesh capital. Two other flights headed for the city had to be diverted for the same reason.
Many overflying flights were diverted, too, because of the cyclone.
“The flights to and from southeast and far-east Asia that fly over Bhubaneswar, which is within Calcutta’s flight information region, were diverted,” said an official.