Flyers across India are facing potential flight cancellations and long delays over the next few days after torrential rainfall brought down a porch at Delhi Airport, crushing one person, injuring several and destroying cars.
Delhi Airport initially said flights would not take off till 2pm on Friday after the concrete canopy of the Terminal 1 departure area collapsed. But then as the full extent of the damage became apparent and worries were expressed about the construction soundness of the rest of the airport, authorities announced that all flights had been “suspended till further notice.” The airport operator added that flights were being, “rescheduled by the respective airlines to operate from Terminal 2 and Terminal 3.”
Terminal 1 is the departure point for the country’s largest airline, IndiGo, and also SpiceJet. Airline consultancy Cirium reckoned that the Terminal 1 closure would impact a total of 89 flights on Saturday and 90 on Sunday. This adds up to about 20 per cent of the country’s daily scheduled flights.
GMR, which operates Delhi’s Indira Gandhi Airport, aims to have these scheduled flights departing from both Terminal 2 and Terminal 3 but this may lead to gigantic logistic issues.
In 2021 when the Covid-19 pandemic was at its peak, Delhi airport shut down Terminal 2 because the number of flights fell from 1,500 to 325 and the number of daily domestic passengers shrank to a low of around 30,000.
Currently, however, air traffic is soaring again. It touched around 4.71 lakh daily in FY 2023-24. Delhi’s Indira Gandhi Airport has also emerged amongst the world’s five top airports. It has long overtaken Mumbai's Shivaji Chhatrapati Airport as the country’s biggest airport and, as a result, shutting a terminal will have a huge impact on flights in all corners of the country.
Given these numbers, making room for both IndiGo and SpiceJet into Terminal 2 and Terminal 3 could be a tight fit. Terminal 2 has IndiGo and is expected to operate 72, while SpiceJet will be flying 17.
Also about 60 IndiGo planes are based in Delhi and return to the city’s airport every night and take off in early morning flights to different corners of the country. Air India also bases a large number of its planes in Delhi and so does Vistara.
Delhi Airport’s Terminal 1 has recently been expanded to cope with the rapidly increasing number of air passengers. It is now equipped to handle 100 million passengers. The re-designed Terminal 1 is also designed to handle 40 million passengers.
