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Flights delay causes agony to passengers

NEW DELHI: There was chaos at the Indira Gandhi International Airport here over the weekend as five Air India flights were delayed due to “technical snags”, leaving several hundred passengers inconvenienced. The flights finally took off on Sunday afternoon.

According to Air India spokesperson D.K. Kohli, the worst affected were flights AI-111 Delhi-London-New York and AI-841 Delhi-Abu Dhabi-Muscat which got delayed by over 24 hours.

The New York-bound flight scheduled to take off at 7-20 a.m. on Saturday, was rescheduled for 12-40 p.m. on Sunday. Similarly, the flight headed for Muscat to take off at 12-35 p.m. on Saturday, left around the same time the next day. Other flights that subsequently got delayed by several hours because of the cascading effect were AI-891 to Jeddah, AI-187 to Toronto and AI-348 to Shanghai.

Passengers protested and demanded an explanation from the authorities. Qamar Ahmed said: “There was nobody to look after the passengers, nobody was concerned. It is a shame that our national carrier is functioning in such a pathetic manner.”

Another passenger Jagdish Sharma said: “Only some very junior officials were present at the airport. They had no information about the rescheduling of the flights.”

The Air India in a statement said: “The management while regretting the inconvenience caused to the passengers has decided to look into the technical reasons and also congestion at the check-in counters besides non-availability of the bay that led to delay in the departures of these flights.”

According to Mr. Kohli, lack of adequate manpower and infrastructure and impatience among passengers worsened the problem.

“Of the 18 check-in counters, only six were operational causing longer queues and delays. Moreover, the renovation work at the airport led to congestion and caused further delay in passenger movement from the counter to the aircraft by over 50 minutes,” he added.

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