New Delhi, May 31: More than 200 passengers of a San Francisco-bound Air India flight faced an ordeal due to a delay of nearly 30 hours caused by a technical glitch, the aircraft’s non-functional air conditioning system and payload issues.
The flight, which was originally scheduled to take off at around 1530 hours on Thursday, was delayed for nearly 6 hours before being rescheduled for Friday. And on Friday, the flight, to be operated with a Boeing 777 aircraft, was first scheduled for around 1100 hours departure which was changed to 1500 hours and after finally pushing back at around 1745 hours, the plane came back to the bay, according to sources in the know.
Initially, a technical glitch was suspected and later, payload issues was noticed. The airline is expected to offload some cargo and then depart for San Francisco, the sources added.
For the passengers, including aged people and children, it has been an ordeal as they have been waiting for the flight to take off for nearly 30 hours now.
One of the sources said an announcement has been made that due to temperature issues, the flight cannot take off now, and added that the air conditioning is also switched off for now.
There has been no official statement from Air India on the inordinate flight delay while earlier in the day, aviation regulator DGCA issued a show cause notice to the airline for some flight delays and failure to take due care of the passengers.
In the show cause notice, the watchdog mentioned about 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.
