Passengers stew in grounded plane for 6 hours

About 200 passengers of an Air India Mumbai-New York flight ended up spending six hours sitting inside a grounded plane in the Mumbai airport early on Saturday, when the aircraft developed a technical glitch. Some passengers alleged that they were not even served food. 

Amul Brije, 30, a US-based financial analyst, had to wait for 12 hours at Mumbai airport before his Mumbai-New York flight AI 141 finally departed in the afternoon on March 6. “I had dinner at 10pm on Friday and boarded the flight at 1am. The flight was to take off at 1.30am, but it didn’t,” said Birje. “Around 2am, the cabin crew told us that the plane had some mechanical problem which needed to be fixed. They told us that it would be taken care of quickly and we would take off in 10 minutes.”

Brije and other passengers thought the fault will be fixed within minutes and waited aboard the plane.

“There were families with small kids in the flight. We slept in the plane without being given anything to eat. It was only at 6am that the crew announced that we will be deplaned and our flight will leave at 11am,” Brije says.

Brije and the passengers were deplaned and taken to the transit lounge. “Around 8am, we were served breakfast. Till then water was served only on request,” he alleges. The flight finally left Mumbai at 1pm on Saturday.

According to AI sources, the aircraft, a Boeing 777-200LR, had a problem with its engine, which caused the delay. When contacted, the spokesperson for AI confirmed the delay. “The aircraft had a technical snag which was rectified by the engineers. The plane took-off in the afternoon,” he said.

Waiting too long in an aircraft, before such a long haul flight to New Tork, poses a bigger danger for diabetics and hypertensive patients as well as the elderly. "They lose their capacity to monitor their medication when flying across time zones. Hours of waiting only add to the problem," said Dr Sorabjee, adding that clogged toilets can aggravate the situation with a breakdown of hygiene.

Other instances of endless waiting

• The practice of keeping passengers on board for long hours on the ground has drawn flak from the cabin crew itself. In fact, the AI Cabin Crew Association (AICCA) had written a letter to the directorate general of civil aviation (DGCA) after a January 2 incident after passengers held the crew hostage for more than 12 hours when their flight got delayed.
• On December 26, passengers of an Air India Mumbai-Hong Kong flight were kept on board for five hours after the plane returned 45 minutes after take-off.
• On December 21, an Air India flight got delayed by an hour when the plane’s air-conditioning system broke down. The passengers were kept on board for more than an hour.