Check-in on the tarmac

Vinod Angolkar had never flown in a near-empty plane before. Neither had he flown business class. Till that Sunday, when the 56-year-old deputy duty manager, a member of Air India’s ground staff at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Airport, was put on an “unscheduled flight” to Cairo. As the plane began to descend at 8.30 p.m. local time, Angolkar sat on the edge of his seat, his nose against the window, trying to spot the signs of chaos he had only just heard of. As the yellow lights of Cairo filtered in through the window of the dark plane, Angolkar remembers looking down at a deserted capital city. “There wasn’t a single person on the street, not one car on the roads,” he says. President Hosni Mubarak had imposed a curfew in the city—from 4 p.m. to 8 a.m.—and the airport area, Heliopolis, was one of the few parts of the capital where the curfew had been effective.
As millions took to the streets in protest against Mubarak’s 30-year-old reign, Cairo International Airport was gridlocked. People spent nights at the airport, desperate to flee the chaos. On January 30, the Indian government decided to send a special Air India plane to Cairo to bring back Indians stranded in the city. And so, AI 800 made that journey.
Since no Indian carrier flies to Cairo, AI 800 was an “unscheduled flight”, which meant that there was no ground staff to usher the passengers into the plane. It’s a job Angolkar has been doing for 31 years, so when he got a call that Sunday at the end of his eight-hour shift, asking if he would go to Cairo to check in passengers, he agreed.
06/02/11 Alia Allana/Indian Express

To Read the News in full at Source, Click the Headline

Categories: Air India Feb 2011, Foreign Feb 2011