Bag aboard without flyer, Air India's UK flight returns

Bag aboard without flyer, Air India's UK flight returns

Saurabh Sinha  New Delhi:

In an unprecedented lapse, an international flight that took off from IGI Airport was forced to return after the airline realized that the aircraft had the checked-in bag of a passenger who did not board the plane. After 911, landing abroad with unaccompanied baggage is a strict nono for all airlines and reflects very poorly on them.

The incident was reported on AI's Delhi-Birmingham flight on Wednesday (January 21) -just days before Republic Day when all security procedures are supposed to be strictly followed.

After the flight, AI 113, took off with 139 flyers on board, a passenger reported at the boarding gate at Terminal 3 where he was told he had missed his flight. He told AI staff that his bag had `taken off '.

Airline staff are supposed to scan passengers' boarding passes and keep a stub at the boarding gate. The gate staff have to give a go-ahead that all pas sengers who checked in have boarded the have plane after which the pilot announces “boarding complete“ and prepares for take-off.

In case of the AI flight, the airline should have looked for the missing passenger and announced “last and final“ boarding calls for him. Once the passenger failed to turn up, the airline should have taken his baggage off the aircraft.

Instead, it was the passenger who told the airline that his checked-in bag was in the flight he had missed. The airline did a check and to its horror, the bag was on its way to Birmingham -minus the passenger! The aircraft then had to be called back to Delhi, where the bag was taken off.

“The plane could not have flown to Birmingham without a passenger whose checked-in bag was on board. That would have been against norms. The passenger told us he was strolling in the duty-free shopping area at terminal 3 and did not realize that he was getting late for the flight,“ said an AI official. T3 is an announcementfree zone where passengers have to keep looking up TV screens for flight information.“If announcements are a strict no-no at T3, then AI should have waited for a while and then taken off the flyer's bag from the aircraft,“ said an aviation expert who did not wish to be named.