Comtel Air Amritsar to Birmingham passengers to be helped

Austrian airline Comtel Air cancelled all its flights between Amritsar and Birmingham on Thursday when Skyjet in Essex said it had filed for bankruptcy.
The flight cancellations have left about 180 people stranded in India.
Passengers are now being offered special rates on BMI which the UK Civil Aviation Authority agreed to refund.
Nick Stevenson from the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) said: "What we are doing with those people now is organising special fares on BMI flights back to England that they will be able to take and then claim money back from the Civil Aviation Authority to repay for that."
A Comtel Air flight travelling from Raja Sansi International Airport in Amritsar to Birmingham Airport was grounded on Tuesday when the plane stopped in Vienna to refuel.
Passengers said in order to continue their journey they were asked to raise up to £23,000 between them to help pay for the plane's fuel costs.
Lal Dadrah, who used his mobile phone to film the moment the crew asked for the money, said passengers had been "held to ransom".
He said: "It was surreal. I couldn't believe it was actually happening. It was something that would happen in a film, not in reality... forced to pay for the petrol for the aeroplane."
Comtel Air said it was owed money by Skyjet UK, one of its travel agents, and had not been able to pay its carrier for two weeks as a result.
18/11/11 BBC

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Categories: airports Nov 2011, Foreign Nov 2011