Dubai Airport will return to full operational capacity within 24 hours, COO says
Operations may hit 60-70% operation capacity by Thursday-end: COO
Dubai: Dubai International Airport will return to its full operational capacity within 24 hours, Dubai Airports Chief Operating Officer Majed Al Joker told state news agency WAM on Thursday.
The hub has struggled to clear a backlog of flights in the aftermath of heavy rain that swamped the UAE on Tuesday.
“Once operations are back to normal, we will assess the damages and would be able to give figure for the size of losses,” Al Joker told Al Arabiya TV in a televised interview.
Dubai Airports CEO Paul Griffith also told Al Arabiya that operations are still volatile after an unprecedented 36 hours of rainfall battered the UAE. In an interview with Al Arabiya, Griffith said he hoped operations would return to normal soon.
He said that the airport administration faced a very challenging situation where they had to manage the arrival of work crews and flight arrival schedules which had to be updated every minute.
In a separate interview with Al Arabiya, Chief Operating Officer of Dubai Airports Majed Al-Joker said Dubai Airports will reach 60-70 percent operational capacity by the end of the day on Thursday. Al-Joker said that the record rainfall and the closure of the roads as a result “without any doubt greatly affected the traffic of arriving and departing passengers.”
Al-Joker also confirmed that the storm did not affect Dubai Airports’ buildings and systems. He added that the main runway of DXB was not affected by the rains either.