In a bid to ease out congestion and reduce the ever-increasing incidents of flight delays, the aviation ministry called a meeting at Mumbai airport on Thursday where one of the suggestions made was that the check-in counter should close 45 minutes instead of the current 30 minutes before the departure schedule. The meeting, convened by aviation ministry joint secretary Alok Sinha, was attended by Mumbai International Airport Pvt Ltd (MIAL), Air Traffic Control (ATC) and airlines officials. The suggestion, which was agreed upon by officials from the ministry, MIAL, ATC and airlines, is likely to be implemented but the date has not been fixed yet. Teams from DGCA and ATC, Delhi, were also present.

"Currently, all airline counters close half-an-hour before departure. Often, even this rule is not followed by many airlines and that leads to delays in passenger screening and boarding. To cut down on such delays, it has been proposed to shut the counters 45 minutes before a flight is scheduled to depart,'' an official said. "This recommendation will be assessed and later implemented by the airlines.''

It was strongly recommended that the airport have stricter push-back time limit (time from parking bay to taxi bay) for flights. "It was suggested that if a flight does not finish its push-back action in five minutes, it would be shifted to a slot after those in the queue,'' an official said.

Airlines suggested that the minimum separation between flights-currently, 5 miles-be cut down as well. "Suggestions were made to bring it down to three miles. MIAL is already working on it, but it needs better infrastructure to reduce separation,'' a DGCA official said.