Kolkata: With tickets in their hand and enough food to last for one-and-a-half-day, 25-odd flyers camped outside the Kolkata airport terminal on Thursday waiting for flight operations to resume from Friday.
Unlike other days, when clueless first-time flyers arrived at the airport on lockdown days unaware of flight suspension, all the passengers, who had come on Thursday, were aware of the flight ban. They didn’t want to take a chance fearing lack of enough transport on Friday morning.
One such passenger, Rahul Khan, who is a resident of Silchar, was found sitting outside the departure terminal with a colleague. Both were to take a 9.40am IndiGo flight to Bangalore on Friday. He had come back from Bangalore on March 15 and got stuck in Assam.
“We had taken a flight from Silchar to Kolkata on Monday and gone straight to my friend’s place in Burdwan. On Wednesday evening, we came to the Kolkata airport. We didn’t want to take a chance of taking an early morning bus from Burdwan to reach the airport in fear of getting late for boarding. We preferred to spend the nights at the airport itself,” said Khan.
A 26-year-old Balurghat resident, Gokul Das, was also seen lying on the floor outside arrival gate 3A/B watching a movie on his cellphone. “We have come prepared to spend the night at the airport. We have a flight to Goa at 5am on Friday and it would have been impossible for us to catch such an early flight had we waited for the lockdown to get over,” said Das, a labour contractor.
28/08/20 Tamaghna Banerjee/Times of India
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Unlike other days, when clueless first-time flyers arrived at the airport on lockdown days unaware of flight suspension, all the passengers, who had come on Thursday, were aware of the flight ban. They didn’t want to take a chance fearing lack of enough transport on Friday morning.
One such passenger, Rahul Khan, who is a resident of Silchar, was found sitting outside the departure terminal with a colleague. Both were to take a 9.40am IndiGo flight to Bangalore on Friday. He had come back from Bangalore on March 15 and got stuck in Assam.
“We had taken a flight from Silchar to Kolkata on Monday and gone straight to my friend’s place in Burdwan. On Wednesday evening, we came to the Kolkata airport. We didn’t want to take a chance of taking an early morning bus from Burdwan to reach the airport in fear of getting late for boarding. We preferred to spend the nights at the airport itself,” said Khan.
A 26-year-old Balurghat resident, Gokul Das, was also seen lying on the floor outside arrival gate 3A/B watching a movie on his cellphone. “We have come prepared to spend the night at the airport. We have a flight to Goa at 5am on Friday and it would have been impossible for us to catch such an early flight had we waited for the lockdown to get over,” said Das, a labour contractor.
28/08/20 Tamaghna Banerjee/Times of India
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