Will never forget this Delhi flight: Passenger
It was 12 noon sharp when Anchal Gupta arrived at the Shamshabad on Monday. From the very beginning, she was on the edge — which was understandable as she was travelling with her two daughters in the most tense time ever. The younger of them, aged two, would not wear a mask, her tiny little fingers trying to touch every object or surface that she could reach out to.
Finally, after much delays and checks, her Indigo flight (6E 6468) took off for Delhi at 4 pm. Turbulence during take off gave her the jitters and, two hours later, she reached Delhi. “It was nothing short of going into the ICU for a surgery and coming out safe,” she said, even as she is worried for her two-year-old daughter Vidanya.
She may have travelled across the globe but this mother of two will never forget the trip to Delhi. As for the facilities and precautions taken by the airport authorities, she is impressed.
Anchal, one of the directors of the Neeru's group, which is into fashion retailing, arrived in Hyderabad from Delhi on March 7 to spend time with her mother and was held up due to the lockdown.
“I was supposed to take the 8 am flight to Delhi but it got cancelled last night. Thereafter, I re-booked the tickets and got seats on the 2 pm flight,” Anchal told Deccan Chronicle.
When she reached the airport, there were hardly any passengers in the queue at the web check-in kiosk.
She had already web checked-in. She displayed her ID and that of her daughters along with the boarding pass print-outs, the images of which were taken from a camera operated by the CISF.
Inside, at the check-in counter, which had a glass pane separating the passenger from the staff, Anchal showed her boarding pass. The person at the counter, wearing a PPE, scanned the bar code and asked her to place the baggage.
“Thereafter, I went to the security check area where there were hardly any passengers. When my turn came, I took the tray myself, put it on the top, put the hand luggage. I was carrying food for my baby and the security personnel did not object,” she said.
She and her two daughters then reached the gate and waited in the boarding lounge.
“Only the extreme left and right seats were meant to be occupied. I disinfected the seats with the spray I was carrying. Half an hour later, I learnt that my flight has been delayed and the boarding gate changed. Instead of 2 pm it was to take off at 2.45 pm. I then proceeded to another boarding gate where we were made to stand for a really long time and there was chaos all around, briefly.”
Inside the flight, which was again packed, Anchal disinfected the seats (27, D,E,F) but the flight crew informed her that they had just disinfected the entire aircraft. The crew was in PPE gear.
On March 12, her husband
Sahil Gupta gave the family a surprise when he came to Hyderabad to be with his elder daughter, who celebrated her birthday on March 16.
“Each time the deadline of the lockdown would come to an end, my husband
would book tickets for me and the kids in the hope that flight services would resume but the lockdown kept getting extended. We ended up booking tickets worth over `2 lakh, and cancelling repeatedly.”