MillenniumPost
Bengal

Normal services restored at Kolkata airport after 9 hours

Kolkata: A day after scores of passengers were inconvenienced at the Kolkata airport due to technical glitches in the check-in system, a senior official said it took the authorities nine hours to restore normal services.

"The system, which slowed down and conked off around 5.15pm yesterday (Monday), was up and running by 2.30am," Airport Director Kaushik Bhattacharjee said Tuesday.

A tweet by Kolkata Airport thanked passengers and other stakeholders for their patience.

"The Local Area Network has been restored around 2:30am. We thank our passengers, airlines and all the stakeholders for the patience and cooperation," it said.

Five Kolkata-bound flights were also diverted Monday evening owing to bad weather in the city.

The technical snag did not affect the arrival of flights to Kolkata, thunderstorms and subsequent rain did, a spokesperson of Airports Authority of India (AAI) said.

"A Singapore Airline flight was diverted to Dhaka, three others were diverted to Bhubaneswar and one to Lucknow," the spokesperson said.

The Airports Authority of India (AAI) owns and manages more than 100 airports - including the Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose International (NSCBI) Airport in Kolkata.

A fault was detected at the local area network (LAN) of NSCBI Airport Monday evening, hampering check-in process of the passengers.

Around 30 flights were delayed by an average of 20-25 minutes as boarding passes had to be issued manually.

The airlines, therefore, have been issuing boarding passes manually since 5.30 pm, the official added.

"The Internet server has been down since 5.30 pm and it is likely to start working from 10.30 pm on Monday. Around 30 flights have been delayed in between 5.30 pm and 9 pm by an average time of 20-25 minutes," said an AAI official.

The official said the IT team of the AAI worked diligently to resolve the issue.

Several thousand passengers who were to board flights at the Kolkata airport on Monday evening were caught in serpentine queues at airline check-in counters as the system used to issue boarding pass to passengers and tickets for registered baggage blanked out during peak hour. The glitch and the resultant slowdown in check-in process delayed departing flights by 25 minutes to an hour. Incoming flights were, however, not affected and touched down at the airport on time.

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