Taxing times for cabin crew of Air India flight

Delhi: It might sound preposterous but it did happen. Recently, to operate its flight from Sharjah to Chennai, Air India diverted four cabin crew members, who were scheduled to operate on Delhi- Mumbai flight, to Dubai. And what was worse, at Dubai airport, the airline hired a private taxi to send these crew members to Sharjah international airport.
The incident happened on May 8 and the reason behind it is not clear yet. "On May 8, four cabin crew members who were assigned to Delhi-Mumbai flight were suddenly asked in the evening to operate on Delhi-Dubai flight and then go to Sharjah by taxi as there was no cabin crew to operate the flight from Sharjah. Ironically, there were no enough vacant seats available in the aircraft and one of the crew members had to take a flight attendant's seat upto Dubai," said sources in Air India.
The cabin crew members left Delhi for Dubai by flight AI995 at 8:45 pm on May 8 and reached Dubai after four hours. They then took around one and a half hours to reach Sharjah in taxi and flew back the same night via Kochi and Bangalore to reach Chennai at 11 am (Indian time) on May 9. "All this resulted in the crew members putting in 16 hours of duty which is five hours more than the stipulated time limit by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) thereby being a clear violation of Flight Duty Time Limit norms, " sources in Air India said.
"It was not only a matter of fatigue setting in for the crew members. If any untoward incident would have happened, these crew members would have inadvertently become part of a criminal case," said a senior Air India official.
17/05/11 Surender Sharma/MiD DAY

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Categories: Air India May 2011