City airport handled 21 flights from abroad during lockdown

Coimbatore: The city airport has handled 21 flights from 10 foreign destinations, carrying a total of 3,886 passengers, ever since the state allowed repatriation of Tamils who were stranded abroad because of the lockdown. However, compared to other tier II cities such as Trichy and Madurai, the city has handled only a meagre number of rescue flights.
The civil aviation ministry had cancelled all domestic and international flight operations across the country from March 22. After that, the city airport handled only a few chartered flights and cargo flights from Dubai and Sharjah. While the Centre introduced flights under Vande Bharat Mission in May, the city airport received its first rescue flight, which flew down from Dubai with 180 passengers, only on June 3.
By July 28, the airport saw 21 such flights from Sharjah, Dubai, Singapore, Brunei, Doha, Muscat and Nairobi. Most of the flights were from Sharjah, followed by Singapore and Muscat. Earlier, the city airport was connected only to three international destinations.
Chennai airport handled 144 rescue flights and 20,824 passengers, the highest in the state, followed by Trichy airport that received 83 flights and 13,887 passengers and Madurai airport, which recorded 28 flights and 5,339 passengers.
Aviation enthusiast say the city airport has all the infrastructure in terms of runway, staff and systems to handle any number of international flights.
“It just needs more political will to bring more attention to the city airport and promote it in the international sector. The airport can definitely handle more flights,” said R Raveendran, Residents Awareness Associations of Coimbatore.
The airport authorities say they hadn’t faced any challenges in handling international flights. “Except for wearing the protective gear, which took us some time to get used to, we faced no issues,” said R Mahalingam, city airport director.