Mumbai airport tweets wait time at entry points

MUMBAI: With year-end travel expected to bring a rush of passengers to metro airports, the civil aviation secretary on Wednesday held a meeting to review congestion issues at Mumbai and Bengaluru airport and emphasized that operators provide facilities commensurate with passenger traffic growth.
Airports have to disseminate real-time data on wait-times at touch points such as airport entry, security gate, etc on their social media feed and on sign boards put up in terminal buildings the government said. Mumbai airport (@CSMIA_Official) started uploading wait-times onto their twitter feed on Tuesday and so far the time taken at these two touchpoints has been under 5 minutes.

Civil aviation secretary Rajiv Bansal along with officials from the civil aviation safety and security regulatory bodies took stock of measures taken at Bengaluru and Mumbai airports for decongestion during peak hours. Airport operators also have to ensure that all check-in counters are manned adequately, additional X-ray machines installed to increase security lanes, peak hour flight schedule rebalanced depending on availability of security lanes, said the civil aviation ministry in a press statement. "The airport operators must install additional capacity and redesign their systems and processes, wherever needed to be in readiness for any peak demand scenario," the statement said.
For most of this year, India's daily domestic passenger volume had stayed under 4 lakh even on weekends, the busiest day for travel. Passenger traffic has been surging since the past few weeks and crossed pre-Covid numbers in early December. Tuesdays are the leanest day for air travel but all the three Tuesdays of December had daily passenger traffic cross 4 lakh. While wait time to clear security at Delhi airport has shot up, at Mumbai no major changes have been registered so far.