Can we collaboratively solve the congestion problem at Delhi's T3 and Mumbai's T2?

Twitter is really hot with people complaining about the congestion problem at Delhi's Terminal 3 and Mumbai's Terminal 2. I have first-hand experienced this congestion, the anxiety that comes with it. I live in Delhi and work in Mumbai and do a Delhi <> Mumbai round trip every fortnight mainly on Vistara, Air India and Indigo putting me in these 2 airports quite often.

While many on twitter have tagged the union minister of civil aviation to resolve the issue and called on the airlines, CISF etc. to solve this problem, I personally believe that this problem needs to be looked into from all angles and the solution lies with all parties involved. I know this is a hot topic and what I'm suggesting is personal opinion. Along the way, hopefully I can suggest a few methods, you as a traveller, can adopt to make this experience less stressful than what it otherwise needs to be.

Let's start at the first step, when do you leave from home? There are a few factors that influence this

1. The day of the week you are travelling. Monday mornings and Friday evenings are bad, extremely bad. See if you can avoid this altogether.
2. The time of your flight. Flights that you can take to reach by start of office day or leave by end of usual office days are again bad. This means 6-8 AM, 6-9 PM. Avoid these flights.
3. Check in baggage - Avoid this at all costs, if possible. If you really need to carry checkin baggage, leave half an hour to 45 mins earlier.
4. Terminal - Needless to say, leave earlier for Delhi T3 (its both far and crowded compared to T1 if you are living in Delhi) and Mumbai T2 (its more crowded than T1)
5. Airline - Some airlines are inherently slow and some are fast. Air India - Leave early, Vistara - you can afford to reach a little late, Indigo - somewhere in between.
6. Mode of transportation - If you are booking a cab on the spot, give 10-15 minutes buffer just for this. It is better to pre-book a cab for the time. I use BluSmart when in Delhi. They are reliable, don't cancel on you and most of the times come earlier than the time you booked them so that if you are ready earlier, you can leave.

For my Delhi <> Mumbai route, I usually stick to 6 AM Vistara or 6.30 AM Indigo from Delhi to Mumbai or 9.55 PM Vistara or 9 PM Air India for the return leg. Yes, it is very early and very late but these give me the full work days at office when I'm there.

Next step is entering the airport. There are simple steps everyone can follow to make life simpler.

1. If you are carrying heavy check-in baggage, go to the gate closest to your airline counters. T2 at Mumbai clearly marks this and T3 at Delhi doesn't. It can help googling the gate prior to make this discovery easier. If you are not carrying check-in baggage, go to the furthest gate possible from gate no. 1. These are usually the least crowded and will also give you the opportunity to assess crowds at various gates.
2. Use digi yatra where possible or print your boarding passes. I cannot insist on this enough. I know the environmentally conscious among you will have an issue but this makes the process quicker. If you are carrying a mobile boarding pass, it takes time for you to open your boarding pass and it also takes time for the poor security guy to zoom in and check the details. Don't even get me started on people who don't even have it downloaded and try to open it from email in an area which always has network connectivity issues. Print your boarding passes people. Save time.

Couple of suggestions to the airport authorities here;

1. Expand the number of digi yatra counters so that most traffic can be re-routed to self-serve model.
2. Display crowd level at each of the gates prominently at all the gates (through camera feeds instead of number counters) so that people can see that and the crowd auto distributes itself to multiple gates.

Now that you are in the airport, I cannot insist this enough, try to avoid check-in counters as much as possible.

Travelling light is the mantra. Re-use clothes and it is easy to fit a 4-5 day trip's clothes in your carry on bag. I generally carry one back pack and one luggage bag and this suffices for most of my trips.

If you really regularly need to travel with check-in baggage, try to get a credit card that gives you a higher status on the airlines so that you can check-in at the priority counter. If you are an occasional traveller, purchase for priority check-in earlier.

Also, pre-weigh your luggage at home to ensure they are under the weight limit or pre-purchase excess weight at your home. This is both cheaper (example Indigo offers 5 kg excess baggage at Rs 2000 at time of web check-in vs. Rs 2500 at the airport) and less time consuming for both you and your fellow passengers.

Operating an airline is a very low margin and low profitability business and excess baggage is one of the methods airlines make money. It is not fair to ask airline staff to let you carry excess baggage free of cost. Please get this.

Suggestions to airlines here;

1. Introduce auto check in counters (i.e. a machine to print boarding pass, luggage tags and auto accept check-in baggage as long as it is below or equal to the weight limit allowed)
2. Please train your staff on efficient operations. One can very clearly see the difference in time taken by one staff over another.
3. Introduce multiple city check in counters at hotspots. NDLS already has this but this should be expanded.
4. Enable travel groups (especially tour groups) to organise check-in of baggage on the authorisation of the tour group lead instead of insisting the individual to be present. Handle this in a separate section.
5. Oh and like everyone else is suggesting, please staff your counters and have some backup staff to increase capacity around your high occupancy flights. You have enough data to do this efficiently.

At last, we arrive at the dreaded security check counters and there is so much to optimise here.

Let me start with what the authorities can do better first in this area, before going to what we as travellers can do.

Right upfront, the tray based system newly introduced at both T3 and T2 is a disaster. I really don't know if they are reducing Type 1 and Type 2 errors in deduction of dangerous objects but the inefficiencies they introduce due to the necessity for putting every bag in a tray just leads to so much delay.

I believe one of the reasons they were introduced is to automate the segregation of "good" luggage from "bad" easily using the RFID tags embedded in the trays, but this can be solved in many other ways. We have computer vision sufficiently advanced to identify bags uniquely and the segregation mechanism can be tweaked to handle even small objects! Please take cues from the sorting centres of Amazon. This alone can increase the throughput.

Second, again, use machine learning. There is so much data to efficiently train a model to identify bad luggage. Remove the human from that task. Make it faster. Increase the throughput. I'm sure hundreds of our startups can get onboard to solve this.

Third, please continue the line even post the exit point of the queue all they way to the point of loading luggage to the belt. This achieves two things

1. The Tirupati situation of frustrated crowd rushing in a mass towards the luggage belts and all the chaos caused there can be avoided.
2. One can load their items on to the trays only when they reach the spot for this. I see people fighting over grabbing empty trays and preventing the person at the belt from loading the luggage. Or even better, keep ample trays at the exit point of the line so that people can take their trays and load them while in the queue to get to the luggage belt. This is an easy solve people.

Fourth, lets try to optimise the security checks a bit. Being asked to remove shoes all the time at Mumbai T2 is ridiculous. This ends up taking more time at the luggage loading area.

Now lets come to you the traveller.

1. I know there is a long queue but you need to take a chill pill. Assess what you need to do depending on the line and realistic time of your gate closing. This can reduce a stress. For example, Vistara these days mostly starts boarding only 30 minutes before your departure but Indigo and Air India start boarding regularly 1 hour before the flight. I've once had a person fighting with me to get ahead of me in the line when their start of boarding time was 1 hour away when my boarding had already started. Agreed you need some buffer but please be courteous enough not to break line just to get ahead and chill in the lounge. If you can afford to not miss the flight by following the line, then don't try to skip it.
2. Have some basic courtesy. Unless you are travelling business class or someone who needs assistance, the security line is common for everyone. You are not special. Coming late to the airport is rarely an excuse. Be on time. On the other end, if you are someone who follows the line, be firm and ask anyone who tries to get ahead of you on their boarding time. If their boarding time is later than your boarding time + the time it took you in the queue so far, don't let them pass you.
3. Know the security rules and pack accordingly. This makes it easier to put things on the security belt. I follow the simple rules below;

• Take my blazer, belt, watch, phone off while in line and keep them in my hand to put them first in the tray
• Pack all my electronics in one compartment of the bag for easy emptying. I re-organise the bag post the security check.
• All my chargers are in a gadget organiser. I just open and put this whole bag on the tray without taking any chargers out. This works all the time. You can grab mine from Amazon here.
• Nothing that will trigger security in my main cabin bag that has my clothes. This means small razors, small perfume bottles, no water bottles etc.

4. Your main purpose at the airport is to catch the flight. Don't plan to do more things at the airport like shopping, eating, working etc. to avoid anxiety of not being able to do them due to the long queues.

5. Last but not the least, if you can afford it, pre-purchase priority boarding / emergency exits etc. This way, you can assured of your cabin luggage space even if you board later.

Hope you can manage to keep your tempers down next time you travel. Bon Voyage!