After a video went viral of IndiGo passengers sitting and eating on the apron at Mumbai airport, the aviation security regulator served a showcause notice to both the airline and the airport involved for violating security norms.
On Sunday, IndiGo’s scheduled morning flight from Goa to Delhi took off only at 7:55 p.m, after a 12-hour delay caused by intense fog delaying the incoming aircraft’s earlier flights from Amritsar and Delhi. However, after taking off from Goa, visibility dipped again in Delhi on Sunday evening, and the aircraft was redirected to Mumbai.
Once the plane landed in Mumbai, passengers had to be deplaned and shifted to the terminal building. Frustrated with the repeated delays, they refused to cooperate.
A video was then shot, which later went viral, showing passengers sitting on the apron near their aircraft, eating and distributing food from their tiffin boxes, chit-chatting and scrolling on their phones. In an airport, the apron is the area where aircraft are parked, loaded and boarded.
Security norms violated
“Passengers were irate and rushed out of the aircraft as soon as the step ladder was connected. The airport operators in coordination with [Central Industrial Security Force] CISF quick response team cordoned off the passengers into a safety zone as they refused to get into the airline coach and proceed to the terminal building,” Mumbai airport said, in a press statement about the Sunday incident.
The Bureau of Civil Aviation Security (BCAS) notice to IndiGo underlined that its flight operation had been “planned and executed without taking passenger convenience, laid down security norms, and the operational issues into account.”
Once passengers disembarked, they were allowed to board the flight again without making them undergo security screening, which is a violation of airport security norms. The airline, as well as the airport, also failed to notify BCAS about the incident.
Both parties have been given a day’s time to respond, following which there could be penal action including a fine.
Stuck for hours
Sunday’s repeated fog delays caused several such fraught episodes, where passengers were locked inside the aircraft for three to eight hours. One traveller aboard a Delhi-Goa flight hit a pilot after a delay of eight hours during which passengers had also found themselves confined within the plane for three hours between 12 p.m. and 3:15 p.m. Another group of passengers travelling on an Air India flight from Delhi to Vancouver were stuck inside a stationary plane from 4:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. On Tuesday, passengers on another Air India flight from Delhi to Newark were stranded inside the aircraft on the ground for eight hours.
Airline and airport officials explain that the complex protocols governing flight operations and security need a relook to avoid inconvenience to passengers. For instance, for an aircraft to get a departing sequence, it has to close its doors after completing the boarding of passengers. These planes then have to vacate parking bays to enable incoming aircraft to deplane passengers, and proceed towards the taxiway. Further, disembarking passengers and then emplaning them again entails that they must undergo security screening once again at the arrival area of the airport, which could further delay the aircraft.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Sanjiv Kapoor, the CEO of Saudi Arabian airline flyadeal and former CEO of Jet Airways, proposed that there needs to be “an easy-off and easy-on SOP [standard operating protocol] like in the U.S. and elsewhere, where passengers can directly reverse board and wait at the gate without having to go through arrivals or transit security again.”
