After complains about flight delays and cancellations on social media by dozens of people, India’s aviation regulator given out a warning to airlines.
The regulator is directing airlines to cancel flights “sufficiently in advance” and warn customers about delays in real time.
Airlines have attributed the incident to Delhi’s fog fall.
However, disgruntled travellers have charged both airlines and airports for poor communication.
A man had to pay with assaulting an IndiGo airline co-pilot, leading to his arrest and subsequent release on trust. On Sunday, the man’s flight was delayed for over ten hours. In a widely shared video, the passenger was seen make an announcement on the aircraft while rushing for the co-pilot.
In a another video, travellers were seen consuming food while waiting on the grounds at the Mumbai airport, where their Goa to Delhi plane had been rerouted during many hours of delay.
One of the largest airports in India, which is in Delhi, has had hundreds of domestic flights delayed since Sunday due to a dense fog. Also, it acts as the primary hub for major airlines like Air India and IndiGo.
Although fog occurs every year, the sources claim that other factors, such as a runway closure for maintenance and a scarcity of parking due to grounded aircraft, have made the situation worse this year at the Delhi airport.
In Delhi, dense fog creates transport mayhem
After getting bad on Sunday, the interruption continued on Monday and is probably going to get worse on Tuesday as well.
Two more days of heavy fog are expected in Delhi and other northern towns, according to the weather service. There have also been numerous train delays.
Since Sunday, lots of travellers have been complaining about flight delays on X (previously Twitter) by tagging federal aviation minister Jyotiraditya Scindia and other carriers as well. Some claimed that’s because it was unclear when the planes were leaving, they were forced to sit inside without food or drink.
Mr. Scindia blamed the “unprecedented fog” in Delhi on Sunday for the mess in a lengthy post on X, the previous Twitter a platform, on Monday afternoons
“…Visibility fluctuated for several hours, and at times, went to not anything between 5am to 9am. Because CAT III runways are unable to support zero-visibility operations, the authorities were compelled to impose an indefinite halt of operations even on these runways,” the author stated.
“Unruly behaviour” is “unacceptable,” he kept going, and it will be dealt with legally.
In addition to restating the Directorate General of Civil Aviation’s suggestion, the minister said on Tuesday that “war rooms” would be established at India’s major airports to attend to any passenger annoyance.
In a statement, IndiGo declared that it has forwarded the employee’s complaint to its independent inner committee in order to take “appropriate action”.
Passengers on IndiGo, the largest airline in India in terms of both fleet size and number of passengers carried, accounted for almost all of the complaints. The airline expressed regret for the inconvenience it had caused to its passengers in a statement on Monday.
“Cancellation and delays [due to severe fog] had a cascading effect on rotations throughout the day, leading to further impact on operations,” it said.
A few opposition figures also criticized the aviation minister and the regulator for operational and communication problems, including Pawan Khera of the Congress and Saket Gokhale of the Trinamool Congress.
Mr. Gokhale said that the “operational breakdown” of IndiGo on Saturday and Sunday could not “be blamed solely on the fog in northern India” and he asked the government to launch an investigation into the situation.
“There are horror tales of travellers from other parts of India who faced the same problems,” he stated.
Bollywood stars provided some of the disruptive stories.
The actor Ranvir Shorey wrote on X that he was in a tough struggling since he needed to return home to his son, but his IndiGo aircraft was more than ten hours late. He agreed to lodge a grievance against IndiGo.
A rough account of what @IndiGo6E put us through yesterday:
Our flight was scheduled for 2 PM. All 8 of us checked in 2 hours prior as stipulated, and only then were we informed that the flight is 3 hours late due to bad weather (fog). We were not intimated prior to reaching…
— Ranvir Shorey (@RanvirShorey) January 15, 2024
Actress Radhika Apte said on Saturday that following a delay in their IndiGo plane to Bhubaneshwar in the state of Orissa, she and her fellow passengers were stranded within an aerobridge at the Mumbai airport for hours without access to water or restrooms.
by HHM