Pune: About 150 flyers booked on an AIX Connect (formerly Air Asia) flight to Bengaluru spent about half of Wednesday languishing in the city airport as it got delayed by more than nine hours.
The scheduled departure time of the flight (I5611) was 5.30am. It took off around 3pm, nine-and-a-half hours after its expected time of departure.
The same aircraft was slated to fly from Bengaluru to Chennai, and then to Hyderabad. According to data from FlightAware, a flights’ tracking app, AIX operated a different aircraft on these sectors.
Cut back to Pune. “Like many others on the Pune-Bengaluru flight, I reached the Lohegaon airport by 2am. There was no prior information about the delay. We first learned about the delay when some flyers asked the airline’s ground staffers why the boarding hadn’t begun. They told us that the flight would take off at 6.30am. Many passengers lost their cool when they were told around 6.30am that the flight would take off at 9.30am,” Pushpak Singh, one of the flyers, told TOI.
Some passengers shouted slogans like “Air Asia Hai”. A flyer leading the protest, according to CISF, turned violent. CISF personnel carried him away forcibly, a viral video showed. A senior CISF officer said, “No flyer was arrested or detained. That flyer turned violent and so he had to be removed from the boarding gate. He was later allowed to board the aircraft,” a senior CISF officer at the airport said.
Another flyer said the airline did not provide proper information and refreshments despite passengers waiting at the airport from early hours. “When we asked the ground staffers around 9.30am why prior information was not given about the flight’s delay, we were offered refreshments. An email was also sent stating that the flight had been delayed until 9.30am. This angered the flyers more as the ground staffers had said the flight would take off only at noon,” he said.
08/06/2023 Joy Sengupta/Times of India
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