National menace Air India locks up passengers for nine hours

London: 'Flag carrier' Air India can now only be described as a national menace after its latest act of locking up 200 passengers aboard an Air India Mumbai-London flight on Sunday for an astounding nine hours. The carrier refused to let passengers disembark from the aircraft to cover the rest of the journey by bus or even to rest after the plane had to be diverted from London Heathrow to London Gatwick because of fog.

After the fog cleared the carrier's internationally famous work culture took over with the flying crew deciding they had served their shift time and that a new crew would need to be called just to ferry passengers from Heathrow to Gatwick.

The replacement crew took its own time to arrive with the union maharajas now trotting out a cock-and-bull story about the crew 'losing' its way to Gatwick. All this is happening on taxpayer account with some pretentious IAS appointee building up a PR image of the man who will turn around this doddering wreck called Air India.

Interestingly, Air India has been carefully leaking stories as to how management under the new CMD, Rohit Nandan, is keeping tabs on operational performance of departures and arrivals right through the day, right up to the CMD level, in a bid to improve on-time performance. Passengers locked up inside an aircraft for nine hours apparently had operational approval right up till the CMD level!  

The flight from Ahmedabad via Mumbai was to land at Heathrow at 8 am local time but was diverted to Gatwick, where it remained stranded until 4.30 pm.

Tempers frayed as tired and hungry passengers demanded why they were not allowed to disembark and taken to Heathrow by coach as airlines normally do. They were told that would be technically illegal and one passenger who tried to leave was brought back by police.