MUMBAI: The numerous ongoing infra projects in the city and suburbs have wreaked havoc on the lives of Mumbaikars for over a decade now. As project deadlines are renegotiated every year, citizens are compelled to strategize afresh on how best to live.
This was realized by multiple people at once on Thursday evening, as it impacted the functioning of the
Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport (CSMIA) – the second busiest airport in the country – for an hour and a half.
Departures of several flights from Mumbai international airport were adversely affected – evidenced by pictures of long queues and proliferation of people at check-in desks circulated on social media at the time – when the optic fibre cable connecting the airport’s systems was cut off due to ongoing the infra work near the airport. The service provider is Tata Tele Services Limited.
An official at the airport said, “The systems went off at around 5pm and were restored at 6.35 pm.” This led to a rush of fliers at airline desks, as a result of which they started issuing manual boarding passes and luggage tickets.
Ritu Mukherjee, who was flying Vistara, to Bengaluru, said, “My flight was scheduled for 5:55pm. When I placed my bag on the belt for check-in at around 4:40 pm, the system went down. The staff thought it would resume in a few minutes but that was not to happen. Everything came to a standstill.” Mukherjee said everyone was stuck in the queue for at least an hour. As airlines “called for all hands on deck, back-end teams were hard at work to get the systems up and running”. Mukherjee finally managed to board her flight around 6:45pm.
Another passenger Shreyasi Ghosh tweeted: “Massive Massive Crowd at T2 because of system issue. It’s unbearably messed up.” Flier Bastab Parida tweeted: “Terrible situation at T2, full chaos. If you are flying from Mumbai, exercise caution. Got in after close to one and half hours at baggage drop counter.”
A Delhi-bound flier tweeted that he had to wait for an hour to board his flight.
Realtime flight monitoring website, flightradar24.com, reported 282 departures (81 per cent) were delayed through the day after the glitch, the average delay being 35 minutes.
A Mumbai International Airport Limited (MIAL) spokesperson said, “A cable-cut led to network interruption at the CSMIA. This was a result of ongoing construction work elsewhere in the city. This interrupted the various ticketing systems. All systems were restored eventually.”
Apart from Metro, other civic works underway around the airport are recarpeting of roads and cleaning of sewage lines.
Sources in the airport said Tata Tele Services Limited had informed them that the snag occurred due to road repair work near Pinky Talkies, Andheri East. It had also affected network in areas such as Vile Parle, Andheri and Saki Naka. An email sent to Tata Tele Services by HT remained unanswered.
A senior official from the Mumbai Metro Rail Corporation Ltd denied that Metro 3’s construction work had anything to do with the snag. “There is no excavation work for Metro Line 3 going on outside the airport right now. No one from the airport called us about it either,” the official said.
As soon as the blip occurred, MIAL put out an advisory for passengers to factor in additional time for check-in and work with respective airlines.
Shrikant Kishore, deputy inspector general of Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) said, “The system was down for over 30 minutes. Much time was taken up as boarding passes were issued manually.”
An Indigo spokesperson said, “The outage lasted for two hours, leading to delays. We did the check-ins from the kiosks.”
An official from an international airline said, they had insisted on two CISF personnel stationed at their counter to manage the long queue.
(Inputs by Jeet Mashru)
