With the airport here witnessing record-breaking 172 hours of dense fog this month, only

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few airlines have managed to keep up their promises of operating under near-zero visibility conditions using CAT-III Instrument Landing System.

Even minimising the low visibility take-off limits by the civil aviation regulator, Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) did not help in improving the situation.

On a normal day over 300 flights operates between 6 am and 10 am, but on most of the foggy days not even the one-fourth had services. This resulted in delays of over three to five hours and huge congestion at the airport leaving passengers stranded.

The IGI airport had witnessed dense fog for 172 hours between January 2 and 27. Unlike the last season, there was no fog in December.

"We have two CAT-IIIB compliant runways, equipped to handle aircraft in visibility up to 50 metres, but the airlines' claim that they have both CAT-III trained pilots and CAT-III compliant aircrafts falls flat when anyone could see the number of flights they have operated under these conditions," a senior airport official said.

Of the three full service carriers -- Air India, Kingfisher Airlines and Jet Airways -- Kingfisher operated largest number of flights under the CAT-IIIB conditions, when the visibility was less than 200 metres but more than 50 metres, according to data on operations during the month.