Air India leaves VIPs 'grounded'

Mamata Banerjee among those who were stuck on Thursday at Delhi airport for hours

At least the national carrier can't be faulted for discriminating among its commuters. On Thursday Railway Minister Mamata Banerjee was made to wait for several hours at the Indira Gandhi International Airport as her Air India flight was delayed.



Commoners, VIPs, politicians - everyone shared the same fate on the first day of Air India's domestic operations from the brand new Terminal 3 (T3) of the Delhi airport. Several flights were delayed and schedules were in disarray.

Mamata was travelling to Kolkata with party colleagues. Her fellow partyman and Union Minister Dinesh Trivedi was also there, ironically, a day after he sent a letter to the PM about management hurdles in Air India. The Trinamool chief and her aides, who had boarded the AI flight to Kolkata (IC-264), had to wait for about three hours before the aircraft finally took off at around 7pm, sources said.

u00a0"The flight crew got stuck in traffic near Mahipalpur on NH-8 en route T3. Since no other set of crew was available, the flight could only be operated after they arrived," they added.

u00a0Air India shifted its entire domestic operations from T1A to T3 from 0001 hours as scheduled. The domestic flight to depart from T3 was IC 867 to Goa which was pushed back from the aerobridge on schedule at 0455 hours. The first domestic flight to arrive at T3 was IC 601 from Mumbai at 0755 hours.

u00a0The airlines managed to handle the flight operations smoothly during the initial hours, but as the day progressed, the flights started to get delayed.

u00a0"In the first phase of operations using base aircraft, Air India managed 100 per cent on-time performance. However, the second phase of operations with incoming aircraft of other bases saw some consequential delays due to late arrival of aircraft," an airline official said.