In the next two months, passengers travelling to and from Mumbai are likely to face trouble as the Mumbai airport will partially remain shut for six hours for 22 days. In the meantime, re-carpeting the intersection of the runways will take place.
During February and March 2019 re-carpeting of runways intersection will take place, which will affect flight operations at Mumbai Airport. This will further strike the airfares to increase by 80 per cent on selected routes including Delhi, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad. On other routes, airfare may increase by 30 per cent.
“There will be no flight movements at Mumbai Airport between 11 am and 5 pm every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday from February 07 to March 30, 2019. The airport will operate the whole day on Thursday, March 21,” said a spokesperson of Mumbai Airport, quoted by Moneycontrol.
Around 230 flights will be cancelled daily, Delhi is likely to see the maximum number of cancellations with 33 flights to get cancelled daily, followed by Goa with 18 flights and Bengaluru with 16 flights.
The last recarpeting was done in 2010. Re-carpeting of the intersection area is done to prevent degradation of the runways and to make them longer-lasting. Two layers of asphalt will be laid on the runways to strengthen the surface. The work is done before the monsoon period.
No general aviation flights will be allowed between 7 am and 7 pm, which means that charters and private aircraft owners will also have to reschedule their flights. Although only one runway is used at any given point, the two intersecting runways handle around 950 flights daily, including 30-35 charter and private aircraft, reported by Business Standard.
Earlier in October 2018, the Mumbai airport was shut for a day. Reportedly the move had impacted about 300 flights. The two runways at the Mumbai airport handle about 85 flights an hour. While the primary runway handles about 48 flights an hour, the second sees 35 flights take off in an hour.
