Thursday, September 10, 2015

Paris to Delhi in 30 hours

NEW DELHI: A large number of Air India passengers completed their Paris-Delhi journey in almost 30 hours after changing planes thrice thanks to recurrent snags in the Dreamliner fleet.

Their saga began on Monday when they were to fly AI 142 from Paris to Delhi on a Boeing 787 at 10pm (Paris time). A Union minister and an OSD to aviation minister Ashok Gajapathi Raju were also on this flight. The aircraft developed a computer snag and the flight was finally cancelled four hours after schedule departure time.

The next morning some passengers, like the Union minister, took foreign airliners to Delhi while a majority of them were put up by AI in a Paris hotel. These passengers were then adjusted on AI 142 of Tuesday that was to leave at 10pm.

"The Dreamliner supposed to fly out of Paris on Tuesday night also developed a snag as it did not start. The commander, Naveen Singhal, showed remarkable presence of mind. The Dreamliner which had developed a snag on Monday night had been rectified by then and was supposed to operate a ferry flight (without passengers) to Mumbai soon after the Delhi flight took off. Singhal asked the other plane to be brought close to his aerobridge from the remote bay it was parked at and the passengers and their baggage were transferred to that plane to be flown to Delhi," said a source.
10/09/15 Saurabh Sinha/The Times Of India
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