HYDERABAD: The massive chaos that erupted at the city’s
Rajiv Gandhi International Airport (RGIA) late on Wednesday night, after tyres of an Indigo flight (6E 7117) from Tirupati to Hyderabad burst on landing, continued through the morning hours of Thursday, leaving thousands of passengers severely inconvenienced. The runway was shut from 10.04pm to 2.22am.
With over 30 flights (both domestic and international) diverted to various airports across the country, and a dozen others either cancelled or delayed by over three to six hours, sleep and food deprived fliers were left running from pillar to post, trying to seek information about their respective carriers. Lashing out at the airline operators and local airport authorities, passengers said that they were kept in the dark for hours on end, without any update or assistance, which only compounded their ordeal.
“For at least five-six hours at a stretch we kept standing at the
Hyderabad airport, not knowing who to approach or what to do next. Around us were aged people as well who were at sea. Forget about food, even water was scarce. We couldn’t sleep a wink because we didn’t know when they would announce our flight,” said a flier travelling to New Delhi. Scheduled to depart at around 11.35pm on Wednesday, the flight eventually took off from RGIA post 7am.
Such harrowing tales were aplenty as sources pegged the total count of passengers stranded at the Shamshabad facility to anywhere upwards of 2,000. Among them were also those who had connecting flights either to domestic sectors or international destinations. They were either forced to cancel them or make alternate arrangements.
And even as thousands waited impatiently at RGIA, there were scores of passengers caught in various other airports across India – Bengaluru and Chennai primarily. “Just when we were supposed to land in Hyderabad on Wednesday night, we were told the runway is shut and the flight is being diverted to Bengaluru, instead. There, we were holed up till 5.30am – first inside the aircraft and later at the terminal. We managed to return to Hyderabad only at 7am,” said a passenger travelling from Ranchi.
Though officials claimed that the situation had been brought under control by Thursday morning, sources said that disruption in operations was likely to continue all through the day. In fact, a quick scan of the live flight information chart at RGIA revealed that several flights till later afternoon were awaiting confirmation on their arrival/departure status.
