MUMBAI: Mumbai airport's main runway reopened for the first time in three days on Monday, after a Turkish Airlines jet skidded on landing in the Indian city and became stuck in mud.
Officials at the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport said a team of engineers finally managed to shift the Airbus A340 plane in the early hours and move it to a hangar.
The runway was reopened almost immediately, spokeswoman Anindita Sinha told AFP.
None of the 104 passengers and crew on board the jet from Istanbul was injured when the plane veered onto a grass verge sodden by monsoon rain early on Friday morning.
But the closure of the main runway -- one of two at the airport -- caused numerous delays and diversions.
Bad weekend weather hampered the recovery operation, which involved more than 30 engineers and 200 manual labourers using heavy lifting gear. Crews had to offload baggage to make the aircraft lighter.
The incident was one of an unusually high number at Indian airports in the last week.
Last Monday, seven passengers were injured when they jumped out of a Gulf Air Airbus 320 from Bahrain before the emergency shoots deployed when the jet skidded to a halt on landing in Kochi, in the southern state of Kerala.
An Air India Airbus A330 from Jeddah in Saudi Arabia had to land under emergency conditions in Mumbai on Wednesday, while a SpiceJet plane from Bangalore made an emergency landing in the city on Saturday.
Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2010
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