CHENNAI: Chennai International Airport suffered a fresh wave of disruption on Thursday, with dozens of flights delayed or cancelled through the early hours, as operational difficulties continued to ripple through.
Between midnight and 9am on December 4, at least 13 arriving flights and 11 departures recorded delays ranging from 18 minutes to more than three hours, according to internal airport movement logs. Indigo, which operates the largest number of domestic flights, faced the bulk of the disruption, with several of its Airbus A320 and A321 services significantly behind schedule.
Inbound traffic was hit hardest in the early hours.
Flights from Kolkata, Kochi and Patna saw delays of more than two hours, with one service from Hyderabad (6E6007) arriving nearly four hours late. International services from Singapore, Doha, Dubai and Kuwait also landed behind schedule, with delay durations spanning 30 minutes to close to two hours.
Departures were similarly affected.
Indigo's early-morning Delhi service (6E0456) pushed back more than three hours late, while departures to Kolkata and Port Blair saw delays of over two hours. Kuwait Airways and Jazeera Airways services experienced moderate delays, indicating that the operational disruption extended across both domestic and international carriers.
The morning irregularities escalated into a wider schedule breakdown, prompting a wave of cancellations across the day.
At least 26 departures—mostly operated by Indigo—were cancelled for "operational reasons", affecting services to key metros including Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad, Pune and Hyderabad, as well as regional centres such as Coimbatore, Guwahati, and Visakhapatnam.
Some international short-haul routes, including those to Colombo and the Andaman Islands' Veer Savarkar Airport, were also withdrawn from the day's roster.
Arrivals were similarly thinned out, with at least five inbound flights scrapped, including services from Indore, Mumbai, Kochi, Jaipur and Ahmedabad.