The city airport’s six-hour shutdown, three days a week for repair of runways, has led to a steep rise in airfares on the Mumbai-Delhi route – the busiest in the country.
The Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport (CSMIA), which handles an average of 950 operations daily, has taken 230 flights off the schedule on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays until March 30. Of these, 30 are on the Mumbai-Delhi corridor which has 132 flights daily. Also, the scheduled flights have been squeezed into the morning and late-night schedules to avoid the 11am to 5pm shutdown period, resulting in fares for early morning flights, which are usually cheaper, touching Rs 9,500.
