Airlines cancel 630 flights on Day 1, spark chaos at airports
38 flights cancelled from Hyderabad; travel plans disrupted for thousands
Even as the reopening of domestic air services brought some respite for those stranded away from home, the cancellation of several flights at the Shamshabad airport on Monday caused chaos and frustration among people. This was part of the nationwide experience on the first day of resumption of flight services after two months of the lockdown.
Even as people from different parts booked flights, some hard-nosed negotiations that went late into Sunday night between the civil aviation ministry and state governments ended with Telangana reportedly informing that it was not in a position to receive more than 20 arrivals and cannot permit more than
19 departures a day.
As per the original schedule, at least double this number of flights were to operate every day from Rajiv Gandhi International Airport.
The last-minute change of plans late on Sunday night resulted in several airlines contacting their passengers and informing them of cancelled flights. Every arrival and departing flight gets a slot at an airport and this requires coordination between different agencies and the airlines. The work went on well into the night to rearrange the flight schedules, it was learnt.
According to the RGIA website, seven arriving and 31 departing flights were cancelled on Monday.
A PTI report from Delhi said that nationwide, around 630 flights were cancelled.
Among the many passengers whose travel plans were thrown awry was Anita Dalal, a passenger scheduled to travel from Kolhapur to Mumbai via Hyderabad on Monday. She was stuck in the chaos after her confirmed Indigo flight was cancelled at the last minute.
“I received a message at 1 am on May 25 that my flight scheduled at 2 pm was cancelled due to
Covid-19 travel restrictions. I have been stranded in Kolhapur since the lockdown began two months ago. There have been no other means of transport in Maharashtra, so I finally booked a connecting flight to Mumbai via Hyderabad and it got cancelled too,” she said.
She said officials had provided no clarification yet. “As for the refund, I have been told that money in the form of a credit shall be available for other flight options for a year. Who is going to travel in these conditions now? I don’t want to waste that money. I’d rather get that money back, so I can try to hire a car to travel home now,” she said.
At Hyderabad, flights from Delhi, Bengaluru, Bahrain, and Colombo were cancelled. Thirtyone flights to Delhi, Gwalior, Tirupati, Kolkata, Lucknow,
Mumbai, Kolhapur, Chennai, Visakhapatnam, Jaipur, and Bengaluru among others were cancelled, according to the RGIA official website.
On Monday, RGIA operated flights from or to Mumbai, Bengaluru, Delhi, Vidyanagar (Karnataka), Jaipur, Raipur, Kolhapur, Jharsuguda (Odisha); Kochi, Surat, Ranchi, Varanasi, Belgaum, Ahmedabad, Chennai and Pune. The flights connecting these destinations were to be operated by TruJet, AirAsia India, IndiGo, Alliance Air, SpiceJet, Vistara and Air India.