100 flights to be cancelled at Delhi Airport for runway closure

Economic Times

06-06-2025

Around 100 flights will be cancelled daily at Delhi Airport from 15 June as the airport will shut one of its runways for upgradation.Runway 28/10 of the Capital's IGI Airport needs to be shut for its landing instruments to be upgraded. The first attempt to do this in April had to be aborted within four weeks after flight schedules descended into chaos, with the airport unable to handle its typical load of roughly 1,400 flights a day on three of its runways.The airport will upgrade the runway's Instrument Landing System (ILS) to CAT III B standards—an enhancement aimed at enabling operations during low-visibility conditions common in Delhi's foggy winters. The runway's lighting system also needed to be extended from 650 to 900 metre.Delhi is India's busiest airport with around 1,450 aircraft movements daily.However, impact on airfare will be limited, airline executives said as the period of mid-June has been chosen after extensive consultation due to this being a lean season due to monsoon.
'The Delhi airport handles 1,450 aircraft movements per day. Out of these, 114 daily movements will be cancelled during the runway upgrade,' Videh Kumar Jaipuriar, CEO of Delhi Airport said on Friday.'The number of cancellations will be in the range of 7-7.5 per cent, compared to the usual 3-4 per cent on a normal day...However, this time we have coordinated with airlines in advance and rescheduled flights accordingly, which will help reduce any cascading impact,' he said.It is important to upgrade the ILS as during the fog season, the arrival capacity of all runways comes as arriving aircraft have to be spaced out/ In case of westerly winds, arrivals drop from 42 per hour to 30 per hour during CAT III-B operations. But with easterly winds, arrivals currently fall sharply from 42 per hour to just 15 per hour. Once the upgrade is complete, that number will go up to 30 even with easterly winds, significantly improving efficiency.
DIAL to rework slot allocations and align with the revised arrival capacity. ' The process is meticulously done and lot of support has been given from regulators side and we believe the departure will be much less,' said Debashish Saha, vice president and delegated accountable manager, SpiceJet 'The objective was to ensure optimum use of available runway capacity while maintaining on-time performance,' he added.