New Delhi: Foggy mornings, cancelled flights and irate passengers, the New Delhi airport is a battle zone every foggy winter morning, and this year was no different.
The biggest sufferers are the passengers who travel by low-fare airlines.
CNN-IBN's Arijit Banerjee reports why no-frill airlines and their passengers are the hardest hit.
Unending flight delays and arbitrary cancellation due to fog is pushing passengers over the edge.
Low-fare airlines operate on wafer thin margins, which requires tight control on costs. Their aircraft fly longer than others and rarely do they have aircraft on standby.
A single aircraft is used to connect many destinations which means even a slight delay destroys the entire schedule.
Many airlines also do not base their aircrafts in Delhi. So if the aircraft cannot fly into Delhi due to fog they cannot fly you out.
"If an aircraft takes off late then there is a ripple effect through the whole cycle resulting in the aircraft returning late. If the aircrft cannot come in due to the fog then the problem becomes even bigger," Chairman Spicejet, Siddhanta Sharma, says.
The low-fare airlines also do not have separate call centres to handle information on delays and cancellations.
To keep costs low they have minimal staff at the airport, so if flights get delayed the staff is simply overwhelmed.
For many of these low-fare airlines this winter chaos has been a steep learning curve.
"One of the things I have done is that I have rewritten the commercial schedule of the flights, which will be of major help if there is a crisis in a city. With the airbus service starting from the February 1, our schedule will be more contained with minimal disruption," COO Air Deccan, Warwick Braddy, says.
The Civil Aviation Secretary, Ajay Prasad, has called a meeting of all airline heads to try and find a solution.
But with none of the private airlines having pilots trained to operate in low visibility there is very little the government can do.
With inputs from Neha Seth
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