CHENNAI: Imagine you’re flying back home after a vacation, and when you finally arrive after a 7-hour delay, your baggage is missing. While this can be an air passenger’s worst nightmare, it happened at one shot to 118 passengers of an Air India Express flight from Kuala Lumpur to Chennai.The airline is said to have offloaded the baggage of all these passengers as the plane had reached its “overload” limit. When all 179 passengers arrived at the Chennai international airport at 5.10 am on Tuesday, delayed from the original arrival time of 10.20 pm the previous night, two-thirds stood by the conveyor belt in vain. As Ganesan D, an elderly passenger from Tiruchy, put it, “When the luggage from the next plane began coming, we asked the staff for an explanation,” he said and added that only then were they told that their baggage was still in Malaysia. He further claimed that close to 65 passengers were residents of Tiruchy, who were stranded without their clothes or possessions. According to airport sources and a few eye-witnesses, the angry passengers then began demanding an explanation as to why they had not been intimated about this. By 7 am, airline authorities explained the situation and promised that their baggage would be brought on the next flight from Kuala Lumpur. “We were outraged when they said that the pilot ordered the baggage off. Why couldn’t he have told us,” asked an angry Ganesan. As this suggestion did not go down too well, especially with the out-of-towners, a minor protest broke out. Finally, realizing that there was little to be done, they left their forwarding addresses with the staff.When contacted, an AI spokesperson said, “Carrying that luggage would have posed a safety risk,” he said. To make amends, AI is sending a larger aircraft on its daily Chennai-Singapore run that will touch down in KL to bring back the ‘offloaded’ luggage. “Every bit of baggage will be sent to passengers’ homes and to the Tiruchy airport for them to pick it up on Wednesday,” he added.
Comments
0 comment