Fog engulfs north India, hits flights

Flight operations at the IGI airport in New Delhi came to a standstill this morning due to dense fog and fault in instrument landing system, which led to diversion of several flights.

Dense fog reduced the visibility to zero metre and runway visbility to 100 metre at the Delhi airport. The CAT III B instrument landing could not be used due to fault in the RVR instrument located on the main runway as well the new runway at the Dwarka side, airport sources said.

All the morning flights were delayed by over two-three hours causing inconvenience to passengers.

Due to the fault in the cable of runway visibility instrument that provides visibility data to ATC at the runway for operation of flights using CAT III B instrument landing system during the fog, the ATC could not receive the data since 2 am and no flights could be operated using CAT III B ILS despite Delhi having two CAT III B compliant runways.

Around nine international flights were also diverted to Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Jaipur.

Two incoming flights of Jet Airways from Singapore and Abu Dhabi were also diverted due to poor weather conditions.