Shortage of aircraft & crew forces airline to cancel flights.
There is no end to the woes of international passengers headed to Europe from Ahmedabad as Air India was forced to cancel its Thursday's flights to London and Newark owing to operational issues.
This comes just a day after Air India resumed its flight to London and three days after resumption of flight to Newark.
The AI 131 Ahmedabad-Mumbai-London flight was slated to take-off from Ahmedabad at 9.00 pm on Thursday. However, the flight was cancelled at around 6.30 pm, much to the dismay of passengers, many of whom have been stranded in the city for almost a week. In fact, some of the passengers had already reached the airport when they learnt about the cancellation.
The one respite for west-bound flyers was that international airlines such as Emirates and Singapore Airlines, which operate international flights out of the city via Dubai and Singapore respectively, operated their flights to Europe, US and other places as usual. AI sources said the decision to cancel the flight was taken due to operational issues, and had nothing to do with clouds of volcanic ash over large parts of Europe.
"Many of our aircrafts and crew are stuck in Europe, US and other places on account of disruption of flights in the last seven to eight days. We are trying to do our best with the available resources, but this is an emergency situation," an AI source said.
The national carrier also cancelled its flight 191 Ahmedabad-Mumbai-Newark-Mumbai on Thursday for the same reason. The flight was resumed from Monday, but was cancelled today.
Officials said that at the moment, the two flights - 131 and 191 - are scheduled to take-off on Friday at their usual time. However, their fate would be known only tomorrow.
"This is an unprecedented situation for all airlines. It's been a bad disruption, and it will take some days before the situation returns to normal," an AI official said, requesting anonymity.
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