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The last few weeks have not been good for Kingfisher Airlines. On Thursday, its managers did not help their cause either. Twelve passengers of a family and their relatives were virtually left to fend for themselves at the Bangalore International Airport (BIA) on Thursday evening.
Vincent Lobo, a Delhi-based travel agent, and 11 others were issued boarding passes for their Delhi-Bangalore-Mangalore Kingfisher flight. At BIA, they were to be put on a connecting Kingfisher flight bound for Mangalore.
But the Delhi-Bangalore sector flight — IT-203 that was to take off from Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport at 9:55 am — took off nearly four-and-half hours behind schedule.
The reason was, the aircraft which lands in Delhi as IT-202 from Bangalore, was delayed because of the morning fog at BIA.
Kingfisher officials, when contacted by Deccan Herald, attributed the delay to “weather conditions.” There were though no weather-related domestic flight delays in Delhi on Thursday morning. Airport sources in Delhi also hinted that the IT-203 could have been delayed at the Delhi-end due to “technical reasons.”
As a result of the delay, the Lobo family missed the afternoon connecting flight to Mangalore, notwithstanding the fact that they were already issued boarding passes for the Bangalore-Mangalore segment of the journey in Delhi itself. Their plea to accommodate them on the evening Kingfisher flight to Mangalore was not heeded, apparently because the flight was fully booked. Four of them were accommodated on this evening flight, the last Kingfisher flight of the day to Mangalore.
Kingfisher managers came up with an unacceptable offer to the passengers. “We were
asked to trade in our flight tickets for a seven-hour road journey by an Innova vehicle. It was an extremely absurd proposition made by the airlines,” lamented Lobo, speaking from BIA where he was stranded with his family. However, Kingfisher Airlines maintained that no surface transport was provided.