The flight will arrive in Chennai at around 1345 hours and will depart for Delhi around 1445 hours, the official said. People stranded and desperate to get out of Chennai have been travelling around 300km to Bengaluru after incessant rains and floods forced aviation authorities to shut down operations at the airport till December 6 and allow only limited operations.
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Some commercial flights restarted from Chennai on Sunday (Dec 6) after being suspended since Dec 2 as the southern Indian city struggled to limp back from its worst deluge in a century. According to the carrier, relief and rescue flights with aid and volunteers to rain-ravaged and flood-hit Chennai and other affected parts of Tamil Nadu was mobilised since Wednesday. They are running three flights from Chennai to Port Blair, New Delhi and Hyderabad.
The decision to start operations was taken after runway and Instrument Landing System were declared safe and an Air India’s proving flight landed at 2,000metre visibility in the morning.
“We started technical flights from Chennai airport”. On an average, Chennai airport handles 320 landings and departures every day. The flight carried 30 Air India personnel on board for extending logistics support essential to operate the flight from the makeshift airbase. As many as 20 worldwide airlines operate from the airport, apart from most of the domestic carriers. This is the first set of flights to operate out of the airport since Tuesday evening, when the airport was shut due to excessive water logging.
“This was bound to happen”.
“DGCA will assessment the state of affairs for night time operations tomorrow”, the assertion stated.
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Jet Airways informed that it is working closely with airport authorities to plan for operating its full flight schedule from Chennai. The Air India chartered flight AI-549 is scheduled to take off at 10 am while the airlines’ flight AI 429 is scheduled for arrival at Chennai Airport at 1.40 pm.
