The never-ending snags in the Boeing 787 Dreamliner led to an unprecedented situation at Kolkata airport from Sunday night to Monday morning when almost 150 passengers spent an entire night inside an aircraft, waiting for it to take off for Delhi. They finally reached Delhi after over 13-hour delay.
The latest Dreamliner crisis erupted when Air India’s flight AI 701 was to take off for Delhi at 5:30 pm Sunday with 236 passengers on board, including CPM general secretary Sitaram Yechury, singer Shafqat Amanat Ali and Pakistan high commissioner to India Abdul Basit, who was returning to the capital after witnessing the India-Pak thriller in the city.
The plane taxied out at the schedule time but soon thereafter developed a snag. Once it was realised that the snag will take long to rectify, Basit and 21 others were asked to alight and were accommodated in flight AI 203 that departed at 8.30pm on Sunday.
Yechury was also asked to deplane but the remaining 215 flyers were asked to remain in the aircraft to minimise loss of time once engineers repaired the snag. The snag, however, could not be rectified and the B-787 was grounded at 10pm.
A while later, another AI aircraft landed into Kolkata and it was decided to send this as 701 to Delhi. All passengers at the air port were asked to board this plane. But once that process was over, one pilot’s maximum flying duty time got over. AI was unable to arrange for another pilot and the departure was rescheduled to 6.30 am. Following this, almost 150 harried passengers decided to spend the night in the plane itself. They spent close to six hours inside the plane before it took off after 6.30am.
