Thick fog cancels flights and strands hundreds of passengers in Chiang Mai airport

 

 

CHIANG MAI: -- Heavy fog at Chiang Mai International Airport this morning forced cancellations and delays of several flights and stranded hundreds of passengers.

 

Many flights were forced to circle around for up to 40 minutes, and returned to original airports, while one flight was diverted to other northern airport instead.

 

The airport returned to normal operations after 9.00am or over an hour and a half when its flight operation was first hit by heavy fog resulting in very poor visibility since 07.20am.

 

Airport director Group Captain Visoot Chanthana said that the Chiang Mai airport was informed by the Aviation Safety  Centre at 07.20am today that visual meteorological condition (VMC) in the airport area was just 500 metres.

 

This poor visibility forced the airport to switch on its runway lights and all ground operations were ordered to be on  standby.

 

At 07.40am, the control tower reported again that the visual condition was worsened and visibility falling further to below 100 metres.

 

The deteriorating situation in visual distance forced the airport to halt all operations in the flight area for aircraft safety.

 

He said eight flights were affected.

 

Full story: http://englishnews.thaipbs.or.th/thick-fog-cancels-flights-strands-hundreds-passengers-chiang-mai-airport/

 

-- © Copyright Thai PBS 2016-12-20

finally ... someone with common sense...

"This poor visibility forced the airport to switch on its runway lights and all ground operations were ordered to be on  standby. "

 

Wow, somebody had to get out of bed!