Bedlam at Dhaka airport

Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport has been nothing short of a travellers' nightmare for over a week.

Luggage carts are hard to get by, the queue in front of the departure lounge is way too long, the health officers to verify the Covid tests are too few, and the mind boggles at how crowded the counters are.

This has been happening mostly because flights that were supposed to be operated over 24 hours are now being operated over 16 as the lone runway remains closed from 12:00am to 8:00am for renovation of the taxiways.

The utter chaos could have been averted had the authorities deployed more people to handle the logistics, and serve the travellers, said flyers and employees of different airlines.

Meanwhile, flights often get delayed by up to two hours as passengers stress over missing their connecting flights.

 "It is a total mess," said Razila Sultana on Tuesday night before leaving for Istanbul. "The departure lounge remains crowded and extremely noisy. There is no place to sit. It is even hard to buy food and water. Travelling through this airport is stressful."

The check-in and immigration counters are failing to cope with 12,000 to 15,000 passengers of 110 international flights in just 16 hours, instead of 24.

The chaos seems to peak between 7:00pm and 12:00am when around 3,000 passengers depart on 14 to 15 flights, said airlines employees.

Migrant workers leaving for the United Arab Emirates have been suffering at the HSIA since late September when the Gulf country made it mandatory for arriving passengers to test negative for Covid-19 six hours prior to boarding their flights.

An estimated 3,000 to 5,000 passengers flying to the UAE every day come to the airport eight to nine hours before their flights for the Covid tests. They have no place to rest.

Visiting the airport thrice recently, these correspondents witnessed how the passengers, especially the ones going to the UAE, have to sit on their bags in absence of adequate seating arrangements.

"After reaching the airport, I started looking for a cart. I searched all the six entrance gates of Terminal-2 and the car park for 20 minutes. But there was nothing," said Abdul Mazid.

Travellers are often seen carrying or dragging their luggage.

Abdur Rashid, who was scheduled to fly to Jeddah at 7:30pm on Friday, said, "I reached the airport around 4:00pm as my airlines told me to check-in by 5:30pm. But it's 5:45pm, and I am still waiting in the queue to enter the terminal."

Around 30 people were ahead of him in the queue when he talked to this newspaper.

"Could you please get us mosquito repellent instead of asking questions?" quipped one passenger in the queue.

Inside the departure lounge, there is another long queue to get the Covid reports signed by an airport health officer. Another long queue is seen in front of the immigration counters.

Sumiya Akhter who was flying to Canada with her three children on Tuesday said she gave Tk 1,000 to an employee of an airlines to get their Covid certificate signed.

On Friday night, over a dozen flights scheduled to leave for Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Jeddah, Doha, Bahrain, Dammam, Sharjah, and Ras Al Khaimah, were delayed by 30 minutes to two hours.

Contacted, Group Captain AHM Touhid-Ul Ahsan, executive director of HSIA, told The Daily Star on Friday that the authorities increased the number of staffers, security measures, and counters to address the issue.

All the 42 departure and 48 arrival counters at the immigration are now operating round the clock so that flights are not delayed for immigration purposes, he said, adding that more measures were being taken.

State Minister for Civil Aviation and Tourism M Mahbub Ali last week said 600 unusable carts will be repaired soon and 2,500 more will be procured.