KOLKATA: The city airport clocked over 50,000 domestic passengers footfall for the first time in three months on Sunday, as summer schedule of domestic flights began. On Sunday, 51,465 passengers travelled through the airport by 358 flights. Add to that there were over 3,500 passengers in the 24 international flights.
“The last time we had movement of 50,000 plus domestic passengers at the airport was in the fourth week of December, when there was a surge of tourists in the winter festive season. But by the last week of December, the Omicron wave hit the city and passenger movement came down sharply. We are glad, the flyers have slowly got their confidence back with dip in number of Covid cases. By next month we hope to have 400 plus flight movement and 60,000 plus domestic passenger footfall,” said C Pattabhi, the Kolkata airport director.
Reeling back towards normalcy after Covid’s second wave and riding back on large scale revenge tourism, Kolkata airport had clocked 50,000 plus passengers on 16 days of the first 25 days in December, following which passenger movement started declining with rise in Omicron cases in the city. Within a week, the passenger count dipped below 40,000 as the state re-issued Covid restrictions and also put restrictions on flights from Delhi, Mumbai and later Bangalore.
By the mid of January, passenger footfall dipped further below 18,000 and on days, there were less than even 90 departures.
With Covid cases declining at a steady pace and people resuming normal travel, to vacations as well as workplaces, passenger footfall and flight counts also increased over the weeks and on Sunday the airport witnessed 25,444 arriving and 26,021 departing passengers — the best numbers in more than three months.
Meanwhile, airport officials held a meeting with airline representatives on Monday to discuss the preparedness of the airport in handling the additional passenger pressure — domestic and international — in the upcoming weeks. The airline officials highlighted need of more CISF and Customs officials and the resumption of foreign exchange conversion operators inside the terminal. “The Forex counters will begin operation in less than a week,” said director Pattabhi.
