Thirty eight aircraft operating out of Delhi were diverted due to a severe decline in visibility in India's capital city. Around 100 flights were delayed and 19 cancelled till 8 PM.
Visibility on both runways of the airport dropped to 600 metres from 9 AM to 1:30 PM.
"Due to low visibility at Delhi Airport, 37 flights have been diverted between 9 am and 1 pm to places including Jaipur, Amritsar and Lucknow among other cities," said a spokesperson of Delhi International Airport Limited (DIAL).
DIAL, which operates the Delhi Airport, is owned by infrastructure major GMR Infra. Delhi is India's busiest airport and handles around 1,400 aircraft per day.
Pollution broke all records in Delhi and National Capital Region (NVR) as Air Quality Index touches the 'unbreathable' mark of 1000.
The cost of diverting an aircraft impacts finances and operations of an airline and points to the far reaching impact the ongoing air pollution crisis can harm the economy of one of the fastest growing country of the world.
While diverting, an aircraft burns fuel, pilots duty hours gets extended posing operational and cash burn issues for an airline.
Normally airlines prepare for operations in low visibility conditions by scheduling capable aircraft and crews in such conditions. However, the unusual timing of such conditions caught them off guard.
"We train a certain number of pilots for operating in low visibility conditions and from first week of December, usually pair them in aircraft operating out of North Indian airports in early morning hours. However, such conditions in first week of November was not at all accounted for," an Air India official who handles operations for the airline said.
"Lots of diversions and disruptions today across airlines due to low visibility at Delhi Airport, unprecedented for this time of the year, this is not fog season yet," Sanjiv Kapoor, Chief Commercial Officer at Vistara said. Vistara was forced to cancel four flights till latest information available at 8 PM.
A senior official of Indian Meteorology Department also termed the event as unusual blaming pollutants in air for deterring rain. "The particulate matter in the air is obstructing proper rainfall. The raindrops are also getting more than usually scattered due to the particulate matters in air allowing the air pollution to hang," a senior executive of Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) said.
The light rain also worsened the situation increasing humidity and thereby helping the pollutants getting more concentrated, said the IMD executive.
The IMD official said that visibility at Delhi Airport normally stays poor during the early morning hours (5 AM- 11 AM). "But today what we saw was that visibility was started deteriorating at around 9 AM and continued till 1:30 PM. We don't know yet if it is a permanent change due to the pollution but if it is so then fog preparedness routine of the airport needs to be readjusted," he said.
The unprecedented change in weather pattern has also forced to rethink scheduling of crew for airlines. Sources said that IndiGo and Air India have decided to put pilots trained in low visibility operations in early morning flights for the next two days.
What it means is that airlines have to train a larger pool of pilot for low weather preparations and incur an additional cost. The cost of the training costs around Rs 25 lakh per pilot.
"We used to prepare for maximum 30 days of low visibility conditions from second week of December to early January. If such conditions due to pollution are permanent, we are likely to deal such conditions three months," an airlines executive said.
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