Dirty toilets, no water for passengers to Singapore

Calcutta: The 130 passengers of a Singapore-bound Air India Express flight were kept waiting for over 12 hours today on the plane and at Calcutta airport, with its “overflowing” terminal lounge toilets and “non-existent” drinking water facilities, before the flight was cancelled.
The Boeing 747-800 was scheduled to take off at 3.25am but developed a snag. By the time it had been rectified, the pilot’s flying time was over.
As Air India Express, the low-cost wing of government carrier Air India, does not have an engineering base at the airport, equipment and technicians had to be flown in from Mumbai, an Air India official said tonight. He said the flight would take off at 3.25am on Sunday.
“Once the repair was over by 1pm, the flight duty time limitation period of the pilots was over and so the plane couldn’t take off,” an airline spokesperson said.
The passengers alleged they had been kept on board for two-and-a-half hours and that even after disembarking, the airline’s staff did not provide them with proper information on when the flight might take off.
“We had boarded the aircraft at 2.30am. Initially, the pilot announced that the flight was delayed because of bad weather in Singapore but later, he said there was a technical problem,” said Santanu Sanyal, a Calcutta-based general surgeon who was going to Singapore on a vacation with four other doctors.
He said the passengers were asked to disembark around 5am and brought to the transit lounge of the airport’s international terminal building.
21/01/12 The Telegraph

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

Categories: Air India Budget Jan 2012, airports Jan 2012, Foreign Jan 2012