Ai flight no KA51 [XXXX] BLR-MAA
 

Was booked on AI 264 BLR-MAA a couple of days back. Landed at around 1:45 for a 3:30 departure and when my cab was just turning into the airport approach road, I got a call from AI "flight delayed 3 hours due to late arrival of oncoming aircraft. New ETD 6.15 PM. Sorry no other flights available".

Of course all other flights on that day were 30K .. 40K ++

Two hours into that three hour delay, they finally admitted the flight was grounded at TRV (it is a MLE-TRV-BLR-MAA flight ouch) and was cancelled.

They then took our tickets and loaded us 5 at a time into a bunch of innovas rented from Akbar Travels, which has a sales office at BLR airport. By this time it was 6:30 PM, and we went out of the airport slap into bangalore rush hour traffic so that it took nearly 4 hours to clear just the bangalore / electronics city / whitefield traffic snarls, and we ended up reaching MAA at 2:30 AM.

Innova BLR - MAA = around 9K. Which is around 1800 a head. Tickets taken and absolutely no refund for people who happened to have paid more than 1800. Certainly no compensation vouchers, dinner or anything of the sort.

:mad:::td:

Take them to the DGCA? http://www.dgca.nic.in/kyrdgca/KYR_portal.html

I just complained to the DGCA. Also - many airlines seem to be following this as standard practice - the driver we used mentioned that the last trip he'd done earlier that week was for a canceled spicejet flight.

its amazing how often ai does this at the last minute....a couple of weeks ago on a del-bbi flight i was informed when i got to the airport that the flight is delayed by 2 hours....then after the 2 hour delay we board the plane, only to be grounded for a further hour without any explanation....when passengers started demanding answers for the delay then we find out that the flight does not have a commander to fly the aircraft....:eek::eek:

they finally get someone from another flight & the flight takes off almost 3 & a half hours after its original time....

That salami tactic sounds like good old IC, even AI... I recall AI handling an EK flight back in 2004, deploying the same tactic. In their defence, when things go bad (technical, crew issues, etc), what options do they really have? Cancel the flight outright and have 100-200pax stage a dharna, or try your best and delay in 15-30 min steps?

Same thing happened to me a few years back on the DEL - LUD sector. That sector runs only a couple of times a week and so once they cancelled that day's flight, the next scheduled flight was a few days away..!!!

After a couple of hours of solid haggling, they arranged 2 Innovas for about 8 remaining passengers and we proceeded by road there on..Back then itself the ground staff were saying that this flight gets cancelled pretty often.

Pretty standard SOP coming down from the IC days. Usually used on the shorter haul flights.

Last winter our IXC-DEL flight was massively delayed. ANd after the second delay announcement, the station manager treated everyone to a sumptuous lunch in the airport restaurant and then bussed all 170 of us in 4 Volvo buses. Most of us were connecting onto AI's evening departure bank ex-DEL. I even got a partial refund for the IXC-DEL sector after I sent them an email with a scan of the Boarding pass!

We were among the more fortunate! Jet passengers had their flight cancelled! :)

Sent an email to DGCA's bangalore office way back - no reply at all. I should probably courier / registered a/d a letter to their address.