Choked, Yet Fighting Fit

That’s the story of Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport. With its single runway, it created a record on June 5, 2018 when it handled 1003 flights! However, the situation seems bit ironic on ground.

- Jagriti Monga

By all accounts, India’s aviation sector is thriving. A growing middle-class and a healthy, cut-throat competition among airlines in the skies and operators on ground has enabled more Indians – than ever before – to take to the skies. Projected to become the world’s fastest-growing major economy at the end of the current fiscal year, this rapid pace of the economy’s expansion has also fuelled an aviation revolution. Most of this growth though has been concentrated in Delhi and Mumbai.

From managing 1003 take-offs and landings in a day, Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport (CSIA) — that alone accounts for 17 per cent of India’s passenger traffic — has been striving hard to keep its place at the top of the country’s busiest lot.

Witness the numbers: 46 international passenger airlines, 10 domestic passenger airlines, 48.5 million passengers in FY18 and 783,000 tonnes of cargo in FY17. Staggering, isn’t it?

CSIA has been one of the most challenging airports to operate anywhere in the world. It has two runways but they are laid out in a ‘cross’ formation, making it effectively a one-runway airport. It has a declared capacity to handle 46 take-offs and landings in an hour but the airport has, on occasion, even handled over 50 movements, as they are called. On June 5, 2018 the airport created a new world record for single runway operations by handling 1003 arrivals and take-offs in 24 hours, or almost one flight every minute! With this, it bettered its own feat of 980 flights in 24 hours, recorded on January 20, 2018.