Summer Of Woes Continues For Air India

Air India is facing turbulent flights in the last few weeks. Air India's Vancouver flight from Delhi of June 1 finally departed at 3.15 a.m. on June 2 after a delay of nearly 22 hours, with angry passengers blaming the airline for frequent delays and the chaos.

The Air India flight was scheduled to take off at 5.30 a.m. on June 1 but a "technical" issue forced the airline to reschedule it. "The Delhi-Vancouver flight of Air India, which was to depart on Saturday morning, finally left at around 3.15 a.m. on Sunday." 

"AI 185...was delayed because of technical issues and subsequently due to crew coming under the mandatory Flight Duty Time Limitations," Air India said in a statement on June 1. 

Frequent Delays

This was at least the third time in the last one week that Air India's ultra-long haul flights had to face delays for one reason or the other. Earlier, after a delay of more than 30 hours, the airline's Delhi-San Francisco flight, which was originally scheduled to depart at around 1530 hrs on May 30, took off at 2155 hrs the next day.

However, despite the passengers' plight due to the massive delay, Tata Group-owned Air India did not issue any official statement.

On May 30, the airline apologised and offered a travel voucher of $350 each to the passengers of the San Francisco flight for the huge delay, owing to multiple factors including non-functioning of the Boeing 777 aircraft's air-conditioning system.

Last week, aviation regulator DGCA issued a show cause notice to Air India for some flight delays and failure to take due care of the passengers.

In the show cause notice, DGCA mentioned the inordinate delay of two international flights — AI 183 from Delhi to San Francisco on May 30 and AI 179 from Mumbai to San Francisco on May 24.