Air travel nod is ‘godsend’ for some, still no-fly zone for many

TIMES NEWS NETWORK  25.05.2020

Faridabad-based engineer Neeraj Gupta spent the whole of Friday trying to do something he would normally spend barely five minutes on: web check-in for the first flight home from Indore on Monday. He finally got his e-boarding pass on Saturday evening — after multiple tries, requests to customer care and complaints on the airline’s Twitter handle.

“I am hoping there are no more hitches, including on arrival in Delhi. I just want to go home,” Neeraj, whose previous attempt to fly out to Delhi on April 18 was thwarted by the first lockdown extension, said on Sunday.

As domestic airlines line up for a rather complicated post-Covid take-off after being grounded for more than two months, the sense of anticipation in the air has been tempered by apprehensions among flyers about last-minute cancellations because of some states either refusing to allow airport operations to resume or limiting the number of flights. State-specific quarantine and the middleseat quandary have added to the uncertainty.

For Sunetra Mitra, a professor from Kolkata stranded in Shimla, getting to Delhi to catch her scheduled flight amid the lockdown had been her primary concern until Bengal announced late on Sunday that flights would be allowed only from May 28. She had booked a cab for ₹10,000 to take her to Delhi from Shimla in time for her morning flight on Tuesday.

Aiman in Lucknow can’t stop talking about how the opportunity to visit her native Jaipur on Eid is “a godsend” amid the lockdown gloom. “I had given up on the Eid get-together this year. Suddenly, out of the blue, the government said air travel would resume on May 25,” she said.

For every person eager to board the first flight out of a city, there are scores of others who need to travel but are wary of doing so for various reasons.

Stuck in Mumbai, Deepak Rao is eager to return to his workplace Bengaluru and get to work so that his start-up goes live soon. But after being forced to postpone travel six times, he would rather wait some more time.

Kochi-based Aravind Varma has a workshop in Chennai next week that was to be originally held in April. But he would rather not visit the city now despite flights resuming. “Chennai is a red zone. My wife is pregnant and I don’t want to take chances,” he said.

An American stuck in Kolkata needs to reach Delhi to catch a “ferry flight” to the US next week, but isn’t enthused about resumption of domestic air travel after learning that the middle seat won’t be left vacant. He has asked his travel agent to book an Innova instead for the 1,500km-odd journey by road to Delhi. The trip will cost him ₹30,000-40,000.

(With inputs from Delhi, Pune, Lucknow, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Kochi & Kolkata)

THE NEW NORM: An IndiGo airlines employee during a briefing at the IGI airport in New Delhi on Sunday