Mumbai airport breaks own record; crosses 1,000 flights

Mumbai’s airport, the busiest in the world with single runway operations, broke its own record February by handling 1,003 flights in 24 hours.
The number of flights was counted from 12 am Tuesday.

London’s Gatwick Airport, also a single runway airport, now stands a distant second with over 800 flight movements a day.


Mumbai airport’s previous record stood at 980 flights on February 3. The record before that was 969 on November 24,2017 which its surpassed its earlier record of 935 earlier in the year.

The record rush on Tuesday was primarily due to a spillover of flights from Monday which were delayed because of pre-monsoon showers. Around 20 flights were diverted to nearby airports. Others landed and took off with an average delay of 45 minutes.

Mumbai airport has two runways, but they cross each other— an original construction anomaly, that never could be rectified because the airport stands in the middle of busy suburban Mumbai and is locked by slums on one side and high-rises—many of them illegally constructed—on the other.

The city being the financial capital, has been inundated with flight movements, having long its saturation point due to sharp traffic management by Air Traffic Controllers (ATC). Nevertheless, the airport has faced a considerable increase in delays and disruptions in the last two years. 2017 marked the year of worst flight disruptions for Mumbai in the last five years.

Unlike Gatwick which handles flights for 19 hours in a day, Mumbai is open for 24.