Mumbai Airport: Doors Open To Full-Scale International Passengers After A Two Year Hiatus

Ahead of the summer season, Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport (CSMIA) ushered in to welcome international passengers on board. Starting midnight of Sunday, March 27, CSMIA resumed nearly 238 commercial international passenger flight movements.

The initiative came after the directive issued by the Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) giving the go-ahead to recommence all scheduled international flights operations. This move from the ministry came as a result of COVID-19 cases hitting new lows daily, coupled with the increase in vaccination rate among passengers.

After nearly two years, the first international scheduled flight arrived in CSMIA from Sharjah at 00:17hrs while the first flight departed to Phuket at 00:29hrs. On average almost 150 passenger flight movements are expected daily post resumption of scheduled commercial international flights at CSMIA.

With this development, CSMIA now caters to five new international destinations such as Baghdad, Warsaw, Moscow, Helsinki, Ho Chi Minh city (Hanoi), whereas few of its destinations such as New York (JFK), Seoul and Tashkent have discontinued operations due to the coronavirus impact. Dubai, Jeddah, Bangkok and Abu Dhabi have ranked amongst the highest in the number of flight movements from CSMIA.

From Sunday, all international passengers are required to show:

• Their vaccination certificates to travel internationally
• Those without a double vaccination certificate would require a negative RTPCR test report taken not less than 72 hours prior to boarding the flight.
• Passengers departing from Mumbai will continue to abide by the norms laid down by the destination country.

According to a report by ICRA, the decline in Omicron wave has resulted in the growth of domestic air passengers by around 19 per cent with approx. 7.6 million passengers in February 2022 in comparison to January 2022 when nearly 6.4 million passenger traffic was recorded.

Being one of the busiest airports and a prominent gateway of the country, CSMIA has requested additional Immigration staff to cater to the increased international flights. Besides, the airport has also restarted the International to Domestic recheck-in facility and International to International transit facility.

Also Read: World Water Day 2022: Mumbai Airport Undertakes Trailblazing Measures To Reduce Water Wastage