After a 72-hour effort, the Turkish Airlines A340-300 aircraft was finally moved away to a hangar, clearing up Mumbai airport's main runway for flight operations on Monday morning.

The aircraft had flown in from Istanbul on Friday morning with 104 people on board and skidded off the main runway while landing. With its nose wheel and main undercarriage wedged in slush about 20 feet off the main runway, the airport was forced to restrict all flight operations to the secondary runway. The restriction on the use of main runway 09-27, unarguably the busiest runway in the country, led to severe delays on domestic routes, while some international airlines cancelled flights or diverted wide-bodied aircraft to other airports, all of which affected travel plans of over 30,000 passengers for three days.

The retrieval operation involved 350 people who used 200 types of machineries and equipment. "The aircraft was shifted to the Air India hangar at 6:45 a.m. and the main runway handed over to the air traffic control for flight operations at 6:51 a.m.," said the Mumbai International Airport Pvt Ltd (MIAL) spokesperson.

At 7:07 a.m. the main runway handled the first flight when an Air India jet departed for Kolkata. The first landing was at 7:12 a.m., a Spice Jet flight from Hyderabad. With both the runways operational, normalcy returned to Mumbai airport.

The biggest hurdle in the recovery work was pulling the aircraft from the slush onto the runway, which was finally overcome at 1:17 a.m. By 6:00 p.m. on Sunday, both wheels were lifted off the ground and around 9:00 p.m., the aircraft began to be towed backwards. Before that there were some anxious moments as the nose wheel slipped into the slush again as it turned and the steel plates underneath gave away under aircraft weight.

The runway was flushed with water from 5:00 a.m. onwards to remove foreign objects, and a mud and friction test was carried out for rapid exit taxiway N7 and N8 and the entire length of the runway 27.

"The weather proved a big dampener. Heavy rains on the first two days made laying out of the temporary pathway difficult. Then on Saturday night and Sunday, the high wind velocity forced suspension of work on several occasions," said an airport source.