Actor fights for seat after AI gives 'latecomer' excuse

When Gangs of Wasseypur actor, Huma Qureshi, arrived at Delhi airport on Sunday morning well before the check-in time to board an Air India flight to Mumbai, she was in for a rude surprise.

The airline staff refused to let her check in and refused to give her a boarding pass, claiming she was late. However when a furious Huma took her problem with senior airline officials, she was told that passengers from an earlier cancelled flight have been accommodated on the flight, creating a shortage of seats.

“Instead of lying and blaming us for being late, the airline staff should have told us the truth. The matter could be solved then and there if they had not kept on blaming Huma,” said sources close to the actor. “This is not the way our national carrier should run.”

The sources said Huma’s flight was scheduled to depart at 10.10am. She claims to have reached about 55 minutes early, which is about 10 minutes before the scheduled reporting time for check-in of 45 minutes. Another Air India flight scheduled for departure about an hour earlier was cancelled due to fog and passengers were accommodated in the next one.

The airline officials later accommodated Huma, who was travelling business class, in the same flight but two of her staff members were made to take another flight two hours later. The sources added that there were at least seven other passengers who suffered due to the staff’s high-handedness.

When contacted, an Air India spokesperson said: “As we accommodated passengers in one flight, those who reported early were taken first.”