Daytime operations of flights at Cochin International Airport Limited (CIAL) will be suspended for four months starting Wednesday. The flight operations have been suspended due to runway resurfacing work, which will commence from Wednesday and go on till March 28, 2020.
This means that the flights scheduled between 10 am to 6 pm have been rescheduled to other operational hours. With this, flight services have been reduced from 24 hours to 16 hours of operation time.
According to a statement by CIAL, since most of the flights have been rescheduled to night hours, only five daily services have been cancelled. “The winter schedule, which came effective from last week of October, has already adjusted the services to the available operational time. With the cooperation of airline companies, we have been able to manage mass cancellation of services,” the statement said.
One international service — to the Maldives operated by Spice Jet — and four domestic services will be cancelled during the time period when resurfacing works are carried out. In the domestic section, one service each to Ahmedabad, Delhi, Chennai and Mysuru of various airlines has been cancelled.
Normally, CIAL manages around 30,000 passengers daily with 240 flight services. The management is expecting rush during early morning and evening hours since the operational time has been reduced to 16 hours. “To compensate for this, it has been decided to increase the check-in time to three hours (prior to departure) for the domestic passengers and four hours for international passengers,” it said.
CIAL has also increased the number of security personnel at the airport to manage the passenger rush. With 100 more Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) personnel deployed, the total number of CISF staff at CIAL is 950. Officials have also informed that 400 more CISF personnel will be deployed in the coming weeks. Customs, immigration and ground-handling agencies have also been managed to ensure hassle-free management of passengers.
CIAL, which started operation in 1999, underwent its first resurfacing work in 2009. As per the officials, ‘re-surfing is done to ensure the desired level of friction to facilitate precision landing for the aircraft’. The current resurfacing works will be done at a cost of around Rs 150 crore.
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