More than 300 passengers of Air India were scheduled to land in Delhi from Shanghai on Saturday night but after several hours of being stranded, their ordeal may well continue.
Passengers of flight AI 349 had complained of suffocation after they had been kept inside for several hours due to a technical problem with the aircraft at the Shanghai airport. Many of them had said that the airconditioning had been turned off while even the lights were switched off which had led to many of them complaining of suffocation. After Zee News reported on this, the passengers were allowed to deboard and were taken to a city hotel around 40 kilometres away from the Shanghai airport.
The passengers said that they were not told of the reason for the delay and were brought back to the airport on Sunday. It is reported that here, they were informed that technicians from Mumbai would be coming in to fix the problem with the aircraft and that it is this aircraft which would, finally, take them home. When the passengers asked about the time frame or the possibility of the technicians from Mumbai being unable to fix the fault, they were given no certain answers.
Many of these passengers have taken to social media to lambast Air India for its callous approach towards them. Most agree that while safety is priority and that technical faults ought to be fixed, they should not have been made to wait for hours inside the stuffy plane on Saturday night and are even now not being given a clear-cut promise of when they would be taken home.
