The number of passengers at Pune Airport has seen a significant increase over the past week or so as coronavirus cases in the region are currently on a decline. Keeping this in mind, airlines have started adding more flights to their schedules.
A combination of these factors has led to the daily flight movement going up from 26 in mid-May to 46 in mid-June. Officials added that the passenger footfall is only expected to increase in the next few weeks.
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Director at Pune Airport, Kuldeep Singh said, “As the severity of the infection spread will go down, more people will buy the tickets to travel and the number of flights will go up. We are seeing an increasing trend of footfall and flight operations since the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic has started receding and businesses are opening up.”
Passenger figures from May 17 show that while 650 passengers reached Pune Airport from other cities, 746 passengers took flights out of the airport. Contrastingly on June 14, 2,307 passengers arrived at Pune Airport while 1,826 people flew out of Pune.
Despite passenger figures showing some signs of recovery, these figures are still not comparable to the pre-pandemic numbers. However, officials are hopeful that the number of flights as well as the passengers at the airport will gradually increase as various states ease restrictions for RT-PCR tests.
Singh pointed out that passengers arriving in Maharashtra will still need to provide a negative RT-PCR test certificate.
“The norm is still valid and every passenger coming in from outside the state has to carry a negative RT-PCR report. The airlines have been asked to not allow passengers who have a positive test report or do not have an RT-PCR negative report,” he said.
Recent reports suggest that the State Government is in talks to exempt vaccinated individuals from showing a negative RT-PCR test result, though there’s no timeline on when this will come into effect.
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