When planes won’t fly

Cancelled flights to Europe, due to volcanic eruptions in Iceland, have several students in the city on tenterhooks.
Ravi Theja Muthu, a second year engineering student at Sri Bhagwan Mahaveer Jain College of Engineering (SBMJCE), is one of them.
He was scheduled to travel to the US for a conference on April 16. “I had a 6.30 am British Airways flight (BA118) to catch to London. I was to go to Bolivia from here.
When I reached the airport, I was shocked to find the flight cancelled and other London-bound passengers being guided to check into a hotel. I heard they would have to wait for 72 hours in Bangalore before some development takes place,” he said.
He will now miss the first two days of the conference, scheduled to begin on April 19. Though Ravi cancelled his ticket and got a refund, he will now have to fork out an extra Rs 80,000 since he will be travelling via Hong Kong.
Srihari Bhat, another collegian whose team is taking part in an aero design competition in Texas next week is worried about sending the cargo for the event.
The unpredictability of the flights has Shashikanth Subramanya, who’s also taking part in the competition, worried.
However, the faculty advisor of the team, C K Chandra Babu, is taking things in his stride and is quite sure normalcy will return before the team sets out for the competition.
Chess maestro Viswanathan Anand has sought a postponement of his World Championship match against Veselin Topalov in Sofia, Bulgaria as the grounding of international flights due to the volcanic ash over Iceland has left him stranded in Frankfurt.
19/04/10 Nishanth S Coontoor/Bangalore Mirror

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Categories: Foreign Apr 2010, Indian Aviation- In General Apr 2010