700 AI flyers stranded at Paris airport for over 10 hrs

NEW DELHI: Over 700 passengers of three Air India flights, from India to various destinations abroad, spent over a day in Paris after they were diverted to the Charles de Gaulle airport on Saturday morning due to bad weather over Frankfurt. With none of them carrying transit visas, the passengers were stuck at the cramped airport for close to 10 hours before government intervention helped them get accommodation in hotels.

According to sources, when the three AI flights, Delhi-Frankfurt-Chicago, Ahmedabad-Frankfurt and Mumbai-Frankfurt-Newark, landed at the airport, French authorities reportedly asked airline officials to keep passengers on board as they were expecting the weather to clear up any time. But when that did not happen, the passengers were deplaned and made to sit inside the terminal, which was bursting at the seams with passengers from several other diverted flights, apart from its own traffic. Even restaurants ran out of food, but passengers could not be shifted as they did not have the requisite transit visas.

������Government intervention was required to grant visas to our passengers after which they were accommodated in hotels. All the passengers were flown to their destination by Sunday. The delay and any inconvenience caused is deeply regretted but there was nothing that we could have done,������ said an airline spokesperson.

������We were kept at the Paris airport for over eight hours without food and then suddenly transferred to a hotel where we didn���t get our luggage. I had a conference to attend in the US and I will miss it because of the over 24-hour delay,������ said Deepak Gupta, a passenger on board AI 127 from Delhi to Chicago.