Thousands left looking for their luggage
IndiGo's chaos escalates as 1,000 flights were canceled, stranding passengers and leaving luggage unaccounted for, with delays in returning bags.
New Delhi: The luggage is of different categories: that belonging to passengers on flights that were cancelled; that of people who have landed from destinations outside India, with IndiGo being the connecting carrier; that of people flying out of India on IndiGo connections; and that of people whose flight was rescheduled or merged with another flight.
The passengers, mostly, are of one type: harried.
And thousands of such harried passengers wandering around India’s main airports, looking for their luggage, even as others deal with delayed or cancelled flights, the result of the inability of India’s largest airline to meet new crew rostering norms. The civil aviation ministry , on Friday, gave in to the airline’s demands and relaxed some of these norms.
IndiGo cancelled 1,000 flights on Friday, triggering chaos at airports across the country and leaving thousands of passengers stranded. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation on Friday exempted Indigo’s Airbus A320 fleet from certain rules on pilot duty hours at night, after a representation from the airline a day earlier. It also allowed Indigo to call back pilots deputed elsewhere for flying duties. Separately, it withdrew a rule that prevented airlines from counting pilot leave as weekly rest to meet flying duty norms.
While the chaos peaked this week, the storm was building up through November, when the airline cancelled , on average, over 25 flights a day on account of its inability to meet the new norms.
Among the people with luggage problems is a a 28-year-old electrical engineer from the US who is visiting the airport for the third time since she arrived in Delhi on November 26.
“It’s been 10 days and I still can’t get a hold of my luggage. All my family and I have done since I arrived is call IndiGo’s customer care team... But they haven’t been able to locate my luggage,” she said, asking not to be named
Her parents accompanied her to the IGI airport on Friday . “Due to the volcanic eruption in Ethiopia, my daughter’s booking with KLM was cancelled and they put her on an IndiGo flight. They told her that her luggage will be delivered at the final destination in Delhi on November 26,” said her mother, who too asked not to be named.
Her daughter was returning to India for the first time since starting her first job in the US and the luggage has gifts for her parents.
Delhi’s Baggage Make-up Area (BMA) is choked, said a Delhi airport official who asked not to be named.
“Typically, once checked-in, the luggage goes through the conveyor belts to BMA – from where it is sent airside. Based on the tags, the bags are loaded and taken to the aircraft airside. In this case, with the aircraft missing, bags have been accumulating in BMA,” said the official.
When a flight is cancelled, it is the airline’s responsibility to collect the luggage, store it, and return it.
That may sound simple, but it isn’t.
The official said that when a technical glitch disrupted the baggage handling system in T1 in October, nearly 3,500 bags wereleft behind on one day and it took nearly a week to dispatch all the bags.
IndiGo did not comment on the issue. However, an official from the airline said luggage is being returned – but with a slight delay. To be sure, it is very likely that the airline and passengers have very different definitions of “slight”.
That this isn’t a Delhi problem is evident from social media posts.
One X user lamented about his family’s luggage not being delivered for 15 hours after arriving in Bengaluru where they had to attend a wedding. Another said he was still waiting, 24 hours after landing, for his baggage that contains, among others, important medication.
In Calicut, Lt Col (retd) P K Rajesh posted on X that his flight to Jeddah had been cancelled after they checked in, but their baggage had not been returned.
Deepa J, a 60-year-old who lives in the US, has spent over 12 hours at Delhi airport with no luggage and no idea when she will be able to take her connecting flight to Chennai. “I landed at T3 on Thursday night and had a connecting flight from T1 to Chennai around 2.10am. That flight got cancelled and they gave another ticket for December 6 morning.” But she has no idea where her luggage is.
Apparently, nor does the airline.
