After chaotic Day 1, only 41 flights planned today at Chennai airport

More cancellations expected, say officials

Chennai airport will handle fewer flights on Tuesday, with only 41 aircraft movements — 20 departures and 21 arrivals.

Passengers, however, feared that there would be additional cancellations.

Monday saw the first day of resumption of domestic flights during the COVID-19 pandemic with 36 flights. The airport was estimated to handle only about 2,500 passengers (including those arriving by night flights).

The first flight left for Delhi from Chennai at 6.35 a.m. Incidentally, the first arrival flight too was from Delhi at 8.15 a.m. Chennai airport used to have 500 aircraft movements and handled about 40,000 passengers per day during normal operations.

Tamil Nadu e-pass counters were set up at the arrival hall of the airport for the benefit of passengers.

However, these counters will be functional only for a couple of days.

After that, passengers have to register through the e-pass portal to get a pass to travel by air to the State.

Officials of Airports Authority of India (AAI) said there may be more flight cancellations for a couple of days.

Schedule rework

The airlines had to rework the already planned schedules once the Tamil Nadu government restricted the number of flight arrivals to 25 per day, thus causing the sudden cancellations.

“So when the entire schedule is altered, there was bound to be cancellations. Looking at the trend on Monday, we expect there may be some flight cancellations on Tuesday too.

“We hope it will be normalised after that. But it is going to quite a long time for us to get back the same passenger traffic and aircraft movement,” an official said.