1000 Cancelled flights at Delhi Airport, coming up !

The Delhi Airport has turned on the fasten your seatbelts signs – if you were planning to travel from the IGI Airport in Delhi, between the 18th and 26th of January this year, you are in for a bumpy ride.

Every year, in preparation for the Republic Day fly past, the Delhi Airports asks airlines to reschedule flights between 10.30 and 12.15 pm. The affected flights are accommodated and given another scheduled landing or taking off time. However, this year the Delhi Airport authorities have asked airline to cancel all flights during these hours. The reason – they don’t have enough slots to reschedule the affected flights. This impacts over a 100 flights every day, for 9 days. Not only flights that are scheduled to land during these 105 minutes are impacted, but even flights with a buffer time of plus/minus 30 minutes are impacted. So basically this restriction impacts flights from 10 am to 12.45 pm.

The slight respite is for International flights - those have been asked to rescheduled, which means they will fly, but at a different time.

Not only this order would cause a huge inconvenience to anyone who was planning to travel during these restricted hours, the prices for flights during this period will now increase drastically, thanks to the increased demand. Like airlines needed another excuse to increase their fares.

Needless to say, the airlines are not happy with this decision and are planning to discuss this with Delhi Airport authorities, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

If you have travel plans, that can be impacted by this, changing them now would be a great idea.