Cyclone Dana Flight train services resume in Kolkata

    Kolkata, Oct 25 (PTI) Flight operations resumed at Kolkata airport in West Bengal from 8 am on Friday after Cyclone Dana made landfall on the coast of neighbouring Odisha, officials said.
    Train services on the south section of the Sealdah Division under the Eastern Railway also resumed at 10 am after scheduled cancellations due to the cyclone, they said.
    The authorities of the Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport here suspended flight operations since Thursday evening as a precautionary measure against cyclone Dana.
    According to an Airports Authority of India (AAI) spokesperson here, the first flight departed from Kolkata at 8.40 am.
    IndiGo's flight on the Kolkata-Imphal route was the first flight to depart from here, he said.
    The first flight to land here was of Vistara. It landed here around 8.45 am from Delhi, the AAI spokesperson said.
    In a tweet, Kolkata airport said, "Flight operations resumed at Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport, Kolkata at 08:00 hrs, after it was closed for flight operation yesterday in view of the Cyclone Dana."
    Though flight operations resumed at Kolkata airport at least an hour before it was supposed to after the 15-hour suspension due to Cyclone Dana, a flight from Bangladesh to Kolkata had to be diverted back to Dhaka as a result of poor visibility here, a top AAI official said.
    In another incident, a Kolkata-bound aircraft had to make a full emergency landing after a crack developed at the aircraft's wind shield during flight on Friday.
    The Alliance Air ATR-72 aircraft with 72 passengers on board was flying from Guwahati to Kolkata. The plane landed safely at Kolkata, airport director Pravat Ranjan Beuria said.
    A full emergency was declared at 10.59 am after the pilot of the aircraft informed the air traffic control (ATC) and the flight landed safely shortly after 11.22 am, sources said.
    Sources at the airport said that all other flight operations were normal throughout the day since the officials at the airport managed to keep the airport's air side (operational area) free from getting inundated as intermittent heavy rain continued throughout the day.
    Though there was no water-logging in both the city side and air side areas of the airport, passengers travelling to it had to face trouble since there was water logging at the approach roads to the airport, another AAI official said.
    A total of 112 flights arrived at the airport and an equal number departed from it between 8 am and 7.30 pm, he said.
    A total of 8 cm of rainfall was recorded at the airport from Friday morning till 7.30 pm.
    Meanwhile, train services in the south section of the Sealdah Division restarted at 10 am with the first train being a Sonarpur local, a railway official said.
    Services will be restored gradually during the day, he added.
    In view of the cyclonic storm, the South Eastern Railway (SER), which oversees routes in West Bengal, Odisha, and Jharkhand, has cancelled more than 170 express and passenger trains scheduled between October 23 and 27.
    In addition, the Eastern Railway cancelled 68 suburban trains in the Howrah division for Friday morning, while all EMU local trains from Sealdah station were suspended from Thursday evening till October 25 morning.
    Heavy rains packed with gusty winds lashed parts of southern West Bengal as the landfall process of the severe cyclonic storm Dana was complete on Friday morning.
    However, the cyclonic storm continued to tear through the Odisha coast since midnight.

(This story has not been edited by THE WEEK and is auto-generated from PTI)