CHENNAI: Chennai Airport closed down its operations for 16 hours due to adverse weather conditions caused by Cyclone Fengal which struck the city resulting in strong winds and heavy rains.
Initially, the bad weather resulted in crippling flight operations forcing Chennai Airport to close down operations for seven hours starting from 12.30 pm after Chennai Airport held a stockholder Airlines meeting post 11 am weather bulletin.
However, with the uncertainty over the timing of the landfall and prediction of strong gusts of wind along with moderate rains, the decision to further suspend operations till 4 am was taken, sources said.
Initially, the operations was smooth till 8 am but with crosswinds and heavy rains, 19 flights were diverted to Tiruchirappalli International Airport, Bengaluru Airport, Hyderabad Airport, Calicut Airport, Colombo Bandaranaike International Airport and Kolkata Airport. The diversions and difficulty in operating the flights resulted in Indigo taking a decision to suspend operations at 10 am.
It is learnt that a total of 110 flight services, including 55 arrivals and 55 departures to and from the city respectively, were cancelled. This impacted the passenger schedules who got stranded due to the cancellation and diversions. Apart from that, passengers had also difficulty in availing transport to return to their homes as the roads were inundated and lack of availability of cabs or other services, except the reliable Chennai Metro. However, the Metropolitan Transport Corporation (MTC) arranged special buses to ferry passengers from Chennai Airport.
"We arranged for passengers to be picked up by kerbside. We coordinated with Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) to ensure passengers avail metro services," a spokesperson said.
The spokesman also said that airport staff braving the inclement weather ensured that terminal services and airside services were not affected due to want of manpower.
Seven flights ply between Chennai and Madurai every day. All these were cancelled on Saturday. On Saturday at 7.45 am, a flight from Madurai took off for Chennai with 66 passengers, but it had to return to Madurai. However there was no change in the operation of flight services to Hyderabad, Mumbai, and Delhi. Similarly, there was no change in flight services to Dubai, Singapore, and Sri Lanka.