The airline of Shirdi requested boarders to keep an eye on the status of their flights through the official website of it. All arrivals or departures and the consequential flights may be affected in Shirdi because of bad whether condition.
The news was informed to its passengers by SpiceJet from their official Twitter handle today morning. The airport of Shirdi is presently connected with another city. This is because from April, SpiceJet started flights to the city of Ahmedabad three times a week. The days are Tuesday, Saturday and Thursday. Currently, the airport of Shirdi has flights to go to Delhi, Tirupati, Hyderabad, Chennai and Bengaluru. The airport ranks as the fourth busiest ones in the state after Nagpur, Mumbai and Pune.
The airport has been facing the low visibility problem since the previous year and it resumed its operations on Sunday. In Shirdi, at the temple of Sai Baba in the Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra, at least a number of 15000 devotees can hold online passes on a daily basis.
In the temple, the counter of Prasad still remains closed. Children who are below the age of 10 years, people who are sick, pregnant women, people without masks, senior citizens who are above the age of 65 years will be barred from entering the premises of the temple, according to the administration of the district.
Presently, the airport is managed by the MADC which is Maharashtra Airport Development Company limited. Specifically, the operations of flight resumed from October 7 at the airport after the reopening of the temple. The airport was previously shutdown in April last year after the second wave hit India. The daily operations of flight increased to 10 after that. However, there were only two flights in operation on 10th October. On October 11th, only one flight was operated. Since then, all the flights were suspended due to low visibility that was caused by fog.
The VC-MD of MADC, Deepak Kapoor had then said in a tweet that the airport authority was in contact with the airlines and IMD. They hope that the situation would improve soon. Recently after that, Kapoor told that the DGCA checked the facility for landing at night and the extended runway previously. They were awaiting an approval. Almost 3 years ago, a similar issue was faced by the airport which resulted in the operations of flight being suspended for almost a month. Some airlines even shifted base to the airport of Aurangabad at that time.
Finally when the International airport is functional, it is expected that the air traffic at there will increase with the improvement of temperature and weather condition. In the upcoming days, the number of planes will be increasing as religious people love to go to the shrine during the festive season. The authority of the airport finished the task of increasing the runway length which is very beneficial for the landing of big flights which need longer runs for taking off.