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Passengers’ woes continue at Karipur airport

KARIPUR: Woes of passengers at Calicut International Airport, Karipur, continued for the third day on Monday with airlines struggling to restore their schedules upset by Saturday’s bad weather.

Air India, in particular, was at the receiving end of passenger ire, as it was the worst affected. Five of its flights had been affected since Friday night, one of them (AI 962) getting grounded at Karipur following a bird hit and others being diverted to Kochi and Chennai because of poor visibility.

Events took an ugly turn on Monday when Dubai-bound passengers of Air India Express flight IX 345 quarrelled with the airline officials over not serving lunch on board after a 17-hour delay. The passengers boarded the flight around 11.45 a.m. on Monday and had to wait inside the aircraft till 2 p.m. Yogesh Mundhwa, Air India manager in Kozhikode, said the flight, scheduled for 9 p.m. on Sunday, was delayed owing to flight duty time limitations of the crew. The passengers were accommodated in a hotel in Kozhikode, and the flight took off for Thiruvananthapuram at 2 p.m., from where it was to fly to Dubai.

But the passengers accused the airline officials of treating them shabbily. Zainuddeen P.K., an engineering consultant in Dubai, a passenger of the flight, said that Air India had kept them in the dark about the flight reschedule.

“We tried to reach the airline over telephone on Sunday for confirmation. We learned about the reschedule only after arriving at the airport on Sunday evening,” Mr. Zainuddeen said. The passengers said they were made to check-in, given the boarding pass and shifted to a hotel in Kozhikode, where the restaurant staff “insulted” them. “We were asked to remove the plates we ate from. Is this the way to treat passengers?” asked Ashraf Ulikkal from Iritty.

Some passengers were counting on luck, for their residency period in Dubai was to end on Monday night. Vamanan Kalluparambath and Govindan K. from Kasaragod, said more delay would mean that they would lose jobs.

Mr. Mundhwa said the passengers were given the choice of either lunch at the hotel or flying to Dubai at the earliest. After a heated exchange of words in the cabin, the airline officials agreed to offer more snacks to the passengers as lunch could not be loaded on the no-frill express flight. Mr. Mundhwa said it would take one more day to restore the normal schedule.

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