The Mumbai Airport created a new world record on Friday when it handled 969 take-offs and landings on a single runway in 24 hours.

In a day, Mumbai handles approximately 900 flights. High air traffic movements happen when the number of unscheduled flights-charter aircraft, private aircraft-go up which happened on Friday. An MIAL official said that such flights are banned during morning and evening peak hours, so when the load increases during nonpeak hours, new records are set. The official said that they hope the airport crosses 1,000 aircraft movements per day.

Mumbai can never have parallel runways due to a shortage of land. Add to this the high demand for air travel and it forces the private airport operator, the government-run air traffic control and airline pilots to eke out every second worth of efficiency from the 12,008 feet long main runway 27.

While the runway has a declared capacity to handle 46 take-offs and departure in an hour, on Friday-once in the morning and once in the evening-the runway handled 50 movements in 60 minutes.

Kapil Kaul of Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation (CAPA), a global aviation consultancy firm, says: "Gatwick is the only single-runway airport in the world that routinely handles more than 50 flight movements in a given hour. All others are 42 or less. Mumbai has the second highest as it crosses 50.''

Although Mumbai has two runways, they criss-cross each other, hence it falls in the single runway category.