Yet another incident of Indian passengers suffering due to an airlines' mismanagement is going viral on social media.
This time the culprit is Spicejet, which allegedly made passengers wait for over an hour between the boarding gate and the flight to Bengaluru at the Delhi airport.
A travel vlogger named Soumil Agarwal posted details of the incident on his Instagram account.
The unfortunate incident involved passengers of Delhi-Bengaluru flight SG 8133 on January 10th at Terminal 3 of the Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi.
"I understand that sometime flight gets delayed. But making the passengers cross the Boarding gate, then closing the flight gates and not letting your passengers go beyond any of these 2 ways, and locking them up in the middle is not cool.
"When passengers asked to open the boarding gate so that they can rest back at the waiting area, the authorities denied it and went missing, when senior citizens asked for water because they were locked in there for more than an hour and had no water, the authorities didn’t give them water and told them to ask for water in the flight once the gates are open.
"And when people asked them on how much tentative time would it take for that- they had no answer. Who treats their customers like this?" Agarwal wrote on the post and uploaded a video in which passengers can be seen arguing with the airline officials and security personnel crossing the boarding gate.
Spicejet Joins Unfortunate List
Spicejet joins the bandwagon of a long list of Indian airline companies which are in the news for all the wrong reasons these days.
Air India is the worst-hit after two incidents of passengers peeing inside its flights mid-air went viral after which the aviation regulator DCGA had to step in to take action against the Tata-owned airline.
IndiGo, Go First and Vistara were also in the news for the various different reasons ranging from unhappy passengers, mismanagement, technical glitches in the flight, hoax bomb threats and aircraft leaving behind several flyers behind.
SpiceJet reacts
After it received flak on social media, SpiceJet has issued a statement. It highlighted 3 issues which led to the incident.
Weather Disruption Delay
It noted that the SpiceJet flight SG 8133 (Delhi-Bengaluru) dated 10 January 2023 was delayed on account of weather disruption in the network and the aircraft’s previous rotation.
Airline had to arrange crew which took time
As a result of this, the incoming crew was not legal to operate the subsequent flight to Bengaluru and crew was arranged from another incoming flight which was legal as per duty time limitation.
Passengers waited due to more turn around time
On average, the turnaround time for a Boeing aircraft is 40-45 minutes at Delhi airport while on this flight particular flight the turnaround time was around 20 minutes more than the average turnaround time.
As passengers had completed the security check they were requested to wait at the aerobridge. All passengers on the said flight were provided service recovery vouchers.
