Even after irate travellers created chaos at Delhi airport on Sunday following massive flight delays, national carrier fails to mend ways

Air India on a wing and a prayer?

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Air India on a wing and a prayer?

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Even after irate travellers created chaos at Delhi airport on Sunday following massive flight delays, national carrier fails to mend ways

It seems frequent complaints by Air India passengers are falling upon deaf ears as problems continued at the swanky Terminal 3 (T3) of Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA) late on Tuesday night. A passenger shared his harrowing experience with MiD DAY after having to wait at the airport for six hours without information before he boarded his flight to Chennai.

Show of hands: Angry commuters gheraoed the Air India General
Manager on Sunday night as flights were delayed by 12 hours.

Vasundhar Boddapati, director of technology and strategy at Smart Wyn was travelling on AI-642 from Delhi to Chennai, which was scheduled to depart at 8:15 pm. But Vasundhar finally boarded the flight at 1:30 am. "I called the customer care department before coming to the airport. I was told the flight was on time. It was only after reaching the airport that I saw the information board showing a delay of two hours. But there was no assistance from the Air India officials," he said.

Passengers kept calling the customer care number and were told each time that the flight was on time. "At 11.45 pm the information board was reflecting scheduled departure at 11.15 pm. There were no officials available to assist us. More than 145 passengers gathered together and only then two officials came to pacify the passengers. They first accommodated passengers going to Jeddah who were waiting for more than 12 hours. We also asked them about the delay so they brought a plane to pacify us. It was finally 1:30 am when we boarded the flight," Vasundhar added.

Air India (AI), which is working on shifting its entire domestic operations on T3 from Thursday, is flooded with complaints of delay and chaos.

The situation continues even after civil aviation minister Praful Patel directed the national carrier and the airport operator to take urgent measures to mitigate the grievances of passengers and carried out an inspection on Tuesday. The Delhi International Airport Limited ( DIAL) insists that AI is solely responsible for delays and cancellations.

The Other Side

AI officials tried to defend this by saying that since the airline has to operate more than 100 flights from four different locations, there has been a problem of coordination among its staff.
They said, however, that efforts were on to solve the problem.
"We have signed a contract with two companies to deal with staff shortage. Officers from other departments have also been brought to T- 3 to address passengers' grievances," said a source.
According to sources, there has been a lack of coordination between Air India and DIAL, leading to the chaos at T- 3.