PUNE: Passengers missed national and international connections, were made to board and de-board an Air India Pune-New Delhi flight four times causing them extreme inconvenience on Thursday night.
The flight AI 854 scheduled to take off at 10.15 pm on Thursday and arrive at 12.25 am at New Delhi suffered a technical snag, leaving its 150 passengers stranded for eight hours at Pune airport.
It finally departed at 6.15 am on Friday morning.
Many passengers who had connecting flights to New York, London and Frankfurt missed their flights. Air India spokesperson Dhananjay Kumar said, “There was technical problem with the plane. The problem was related to oil filter. The flight took off on Friday morning.”
The entire episode caused extreme inconvenience especially to senior citizens, patients with ailments and children, eyewitnesses said.
Arun Singh, a passenger said, “We were asked to board and de-board the plane four times which was a tough task as passengers were exhausted. The senior citizens suffered the most while children and women had their share of problems. This issue could have been tackled well with professionalism which was missing. The passengers suffered a great deal due to the technical glitch and many of us missed our connecting flights.”
Shreya Kumar , an IT professional said, “The technical failure lead to my missing out an important meeting in Delhi. The passengers suffered becaue of way the crisis was handled.”
Achutya Ghosh, a harried passenger posted on twitter: The flight that was scheduled to land at 12.25 am landed at 8.15 am. Apparently, the aircraft developed a technical snag. What was appalling though was the treatment of passengers and the complete lack of crisis management on the part of AI and Pune Airport,” he said.
A passenger said that airport officials in their briefing told them that spare parts for the aircraft were being procured from another airport and it would take time. Before that they had informed that there was technical problem with the engine.
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