Cyclone Yaas: Flights resume at Patna airport after 14 hours

PATNA: Flight operations at the Jayaprakash Narayan International Airport resumed on Friday morning after being suspended for nearly 14 hours due to bad weather conditions under the impact of the cyclone Yaas.
IndiGo’s Delhi-bound flight was the first that landed at Patna airport at 10.46 am after the Airports Authority of India (AAI)- Patna got the green signal for the commencement of flights following a review meeting of the regional executive director eastern region with the airport officials (including operations) and meteorological department at seven in the morning.
The airport’s deputy general manager (air traffic management), Santosh Kumar said the flight operations were resumed at 9 am, following which no disruption in aircraft movement was seen on Friday. “As far as the rescheduling of cancelled flights is concerned, the airlines have merged few flights due to low occupancy in aircraft due to pandemic and lockdown,” he told this newspaper.
The airport officials had announced the suspension of all air services on Thursday evening due to heavy rainfall, which led to the cancellation of four aircraft and the diversion of two flights.
Altogether 18 flights operated at the city airport on Friday, however, no aircraft was diverted or cancelled due to inclement weather. Three flights suffered delays, including SpiceJet’s Ahmedabad- Patna aircraft, which got delayed by more than five hours while two flights of IndiGo to Bengaluru suffered minor delays.
Several flyers had to face hassles owing to the rescheduling of flights and delays. Amit Ranjan, who was travelling to Ahmedabad, said the airline kept changing its scheduled time due to the climatic conditions. “Flight is getting delayed again and again citing bad weather, however, another airline’s flight for the same route was on time. In the Covid pandemic, passengers had to wait for 5 hours at the airport,” he said.
Another flyer, Puneet Singh also suffered due to the flight delay, said, “After every 40 minutes, the airline rescheduled its time without informing the passengers about the actual reason behind the delay.”
Both IndiGo and SpiceJet executives attributed the delays to bad weather.