By Abhijith Ganapavaram and Tanvi Mehta
NEW DELHI (Reuters) -Aircraft movement at Delhi airport was hampered on Friday because its Air Traffic Control system suffered a technical problem, the Airports Authority of India (AAI) said after several flights were disrupted at one of the world’s busiest airports.
Top airlines IndiGo, Air India and Spicejet said their flight operations were affected, leading to delays and longer wait times.
The AAI said a technical issue in the Automatic Message Switching System, which supports Air Traffic Control data, caused the disruption.
“Controllers are processing flight plans manually, leading to some delays. Technical teams are working to restore the system at the earliest,” AAI said in a post on X.
IndiGo said flight operations at Delhi and several northern regions were impacted.
The airlines did not elaborate further.
The issue delayed about 70-80 flight departures by more than 30 minutes on Friday morning and 25 flights were affected on Thursday, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters.
The airport handles 60-70 aircraft movements per hour.
Data from Flightradar24 showed dozens of flights were delayed, with several departure timings in the red for Friday morning. The website said the average departure delay was 55 minutes.
According to the website, ITA Airways’ flight to Rome was delayed by nearly two hours and Virgin Atlantic’s flight to London by over an hour. Flights scheduled to take off between 6 a.m. and 8 a.m. (0030 GMT and 0230 GMT) were the most affected.
Aircraft were still landing at the airport, but take-offs were disrupted, an airline source told Reuters. The Air Traffic Control has not yet told airlines when the issue would be resolved, the source added.
Delhi airport handled about 78 million passengers in 2024, making it the ninth busiest airport in the world, according to Airports Council International.
(Reporting by Tanvi Mehta, Abhijith Ganapavaram, Surbhi Misra and Aleef Jahan in Bengaluru; Editing by Rashmi Aich and Raju Gopalakrishnan)
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