Immigration Bureau employees working at Phuket International Airport had to work in emergency mode on the morning of February 25, when seven international flights landed on the island one after another. In 40 minutes, according to the Phuket Info Center, approximately 1,450 people passed through passport control. All the passport control desks were working at the same time, but it was not possible to avoid queues. Although the photo is not as bad as in Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi.
In the publication of the page Phuket Info Center, associated with the Governor’s office, it is noted that the rush hour was approximately 10 am Saturday, February 25. In a 40-minute period, one eighth of the daily norm of passengers passed through passport control.
Phuket Info Center does not provide a list of flights whose passengers passed through passport control around 10 am, but on FlightRadar24 the data differs, as the schedule and real time of landing of flights still varies.
The schedule for the morning of February 25 includes seven flights that were supposed to land between 9:50 and 10:25. In less than 40 minutes, the airport was supposed to receive the following flights:
- MH786 from Kuala Lumpur;
- EO3515 from Novosibirsk;
- AY151 from Helsinki;
- TR658 from Singapore;
- 6E1914 from Mumbai;
- SU274 from Moscow;
- UO724 from Hong Kong.
Since all these flights were on the approved schedule, the emergency was not supposed to come as a surprise to the staff of the Immigration Bureau. However, in reality, the flight landing schedule was different, since some planes were delayed, and some, on the contrary, arrived earlier.
FlightRadar24 recorded the following seven landings in the hourly interval between 9:23 and 10:26 am:
- MH786 from Kuala Lumpur;
- AY151 from Helsinki;
- TR658 from Singapore;
- 6E1914 from Mumbai;
- UO724 from Hong Kong.
- SQ728 from Singapore;
- G841 from Bengaluru.
Aeroflot flight SU274 from Moscow, according to data FlightRadar24, landed at exactly 11:00 instead of 10:20. Flight ICAR (Fly Spring) from Novosibirsk EO3515 arrived at 9:09 instead of the planned 9:55.
Phuket Info Center ceased to publish daily statistics on foreign arrivals at the airport, so it is impossible to say how many international passengers in total have passed through Phuket International Airport. The arithmetic average for the period from January 1 to February 14 (latest available data) is 11.5 thousand passengers per day.
The list of the top five tourism markets for the first month and a half is as follows:
- Russia – 153.4 thousand passengers;
- India – 33.9 thousand;
- Kazakhstan – 33.8 thousand;
- Great Britain – 25 thousand;
- China – 24.5 thousand
At the same time, the number of flights from China continues to grow, so as of February 25, Chinese tourists could already overtake the British, although they hardly caught up with citizens of India and Kazakhstan.
From Friday, February 24, flights have been added to the Phuket airport schedule Hainan Airlines in the amount of five per week. In addition, the number of indirect arrivals is unknown. The statistics of the Immigration Bureau recorded the passage of passport control on the island, if a passenger received a stamp in his passport in Bangkok, and then flew to Phuket on a domestic flight, then he no longer got into local statistics.