Passengers queue up outside Mumbai airport from night to take morning flights home

Flights are resuming across the country from today, including Maharashtra, where the govt was not too keen to resume operations. Passengers gathered at the airport from Sunday night to board the morning flights.

After a hectic round of negotiations, the Maharashtra government has finally relented and given a green signal to resuming flight operations in the state from Monday.

Maharashtra government has given permission to operate only 25 flights to fly from Mumbai and 25 flights to land at the airport. Flight slots to accommodate all airlines was still going on till late in the night on Sunday. Airlines will have to fly according to the slots given to them. The airport authorities are also trying to make sure that the flight operations from Terminal 2 do not violate social distancing norms.

Samy, who stays in Kharghar, started from home and reached the Mumbai airport by 8 pm on Sunday night to catch the morning flight on Monday. "My flight to Guwahati as of now is scheduled at 5 am. I have been stuck here without work for so long that I think it is better to go home. I know a politician and he arranged for our travel to the airport," Samy said.

He added that there were 16 of them who were travelling together on the same flight. "No one was sure whether the flights would take off or not. You know how the situation was. Once the government announced flights would take off, then they said there will be no flights from Mumbai, it was very confusing. So we came over here to not keep worrying over this," added Samy.

Most passengers hoped that their flights would take off at the scheduled time as mentioned on the tickets.

Two siblings who live in Kolkata arrived at the airport at night from Poonam Nagar near Andheri. They said, "We had come to Mumbai for a few days to stay with relatives. But got stuck for two months. It has been a very long wait to get back home. The relatives dropped us here and have left. We have food and water for the wait. Hopefully our flight to Kolkata will be on time at 6am." The duo had come to Mumbai for a holiday but the lockdown meant that they could not go back.