Air India’s Vancouver flight from Delhi of June 1 finally departed at 3.15 am on Sunday after a delay of nearly 22 hours, a source said.
The flight was scheduled to take off at 5.30 am on Saturday but a “technical” issue forced the airline to reschedule it. “The Delhi-Vancouver flight of Air India, which was to depart on Saturday morning, finally left at around 3.15 am on Sunday”, the source said.
“AI 185…was delayed because of technical issues and subsequently due to crew coming under the mandatory Flight Duty Time Limitations”, an Air India spokesperson had said in a statement on Saturday.
This was at least the third time in the last one week that Air India’s ultra-long haul flights had to face inordinate delay for one reason or the other.
Earlier, after a delay of more than 30 hours, the airline’s Delhi-San Francisco flight, which was originally scheduled to depart at around 1530 hours on Thursday, took off at 2155 hours the next day.
However, despite the passengers’ plight due to the massive delay, Tata Group-owned Air India did not issue any official statement.
“If there is a privatisation story that has failed it is @airindia @DGCAIndia AI 183 flight has been delayed for over 8 hours, passengers were made to board the plane without air conditioning, and then deplaned after some people fainted inside the flight. This is inhuman! @JM_Scindia”, Shweta Punj, a journalist, had said in a post on X on Thursday night.
Air India, which was earlier under the ownership of the Indian government, was privatised and handed over to the Tata Group in January 2022.
On Saturday, the airline apologised and offered a travel voucher of $350 each to the passengers of the San Francisco flight for the huge delay, owing to multiple factors including non-functioning of the Boeing 777 aircraft’s air-conditioning system.
The previous day, aviation regulator DGCA issued a show cause notice to Air India for some flight delays and failure to take due care of the passengers.
In the show cause notice, the watchdog mentioned 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.