New Delhi: The runway 29L at Delhi’s IGI Airport has been made fully CAT III operational Tuesday while war rooms would be set up at six metro airports to address inconvenience of passengers, Union civil aviation minister Jyoritaditya Scindia said.
While a runway can be approached from two ends, only one end of the 29L runway was CAT III compliant until now, allowing planes to land with runway visual range less than 200 m but not less than 50m.
As per a report in The Times of India, one end of the 29L — Delhi airport’s only operational CAT III runway — was downgraded to CAT I from CAT III on January 13. With CAT 1 setup, flights can land when runway visibility range is up to 550 m.
The statement comes after the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) Monday directed all airlines to publish real time information on flight delays and also consider cancelling flights anticipated to be delayed over three hours, as part of SOPs to deal with delays, cancellations and inconvenience to passengers due to fog and adverse weather conditions.
In a post on X, formerly Twitter, the minister said, “…In addition to these SOPs, we have sought incidence reporting thrice daily for all the 6 metro airports… Implementation of the @DGCAIndia Directives, SOPs and CARs will be monitored and reported regularly.”
‘War Rooms’ will be set up by airports and airline operators at the six Metro Airports to address any issues with regard to passenger inconvenience with immediacy” and “sufficient CISF manpower availability will be ensured round-the-clock”, he added.
The civil aviation minister further said that operationalisation of runway 10/28 as CAT III at Delhi Airport after re-carpeting will also be undertaken. Once the runway 10/28 is operational, the IGI Airport will have two CAT III compliant runways.
There are four runways at the Delhi airport, of which three are operational. On Monday, the civil aviation ministry had clarified that all three operational runways “were handling flight operations as per their capabilities yesterday, however, with reduced capacity due to intense fog”.
(Edited by Tony Rai)