Passengers Left Fuming As Over 80 Flights To And From Delhi Cancelled Due To Restrictions By States

Passengers were left confused and frustrated upon reaching the airport as a number of flights in several states were cancelled without any prior notice.

New Delhi: Passengers wait at T-3 airport ahead of their domestic travel, after flights resumed, in New Delhi, Monday, May 25, 2020. All scheduled commercial passenger flights were suspended since March 25 when the government imposed a nationwide lockdown to curb the coronavirus pandemic. (PTI Photo/Kamal Kishore)

New Delhi: After 2 months of ban on air travel, domestic flight operations resumed on Monday with a lot of confusion due to cancellations.

According to officials, about 80 flights that were supposed to arrive and depart from Indira Gandhi International airport in Delhi were cancelled. Reportedly, these were last-minute cancellations and passengers who had booked tickets were not given any prior information.

As expected, this led to a lot of confusion and frustration for the people who had come to the airport to board their flight from Terminal 3.

A similar scenario was witnessed in Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport in Mumbai, Chennai International Airport and Rajiv Gandhi International Airport in Hyderabad as passengers were left fuming over last-minute cancellations without any prior notice.

Out of the ten flights scheduled to arrive in Bhubaneswar, five were cancelled. The Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose International Airport in Kolkata is also not operational at this point due to the chaos left by Cyclone Amphan. According to recent updates, it will open only after May 27, with a limited 20 flights per day.

A total of 125 arrivals and 118 departures were scheduled at the Delhi airport for the first day of domestic flight operations amid nationwide lockdown. But the cancellations are said to have happened after some state governments informed the centre that they could not operate the number of flights that they had committed to earlier.

Meanwhile, for those who got to reach their destination, there were long queues witnessed as people had to maintain social distancing and travellers were asked to arrive 2 hours earlier so that there is enough time to carry out necessary steps like thermal screening so that people with Covid-19 symptoms can be filtered out.

(With agency inputs)

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