At Bengaluru airport, six passengers on an IndiGo flight headed for Chennai were allegedly “tricked” into disembarking from the aircraft on the grounds that the airline was unwilling to go to the destination with just six people on board. The event happened on Sunday night at Kempegowda International Airport (KIA) at approximately 9:30 p.m., following the landing of IndiGo flight 6E478 from Amritsar, which was traveling to Chennai via Bengaluru.
“An IndiGo ground crew member called me on my cell phone, asking me to get off the flight as he was waiting for me inside the airport with my boarding pass for another flight, ready to depart to Chennai,” the report quoted a passenger as saying. “Six passengers, including me, were seated in the plane on the Bengaluru tarmac.”
According to the report, the remaining five passengers also experienced identical phone calls and exited the aircraft.
To put it simply, the passengers believe that IndiGo misled them into believing that they would be placed on a different flight that was scheduled to take off, even though the airline purportedly did not want to fly with just six people on board.
All six had to spend the night in the city and depart on Monday since there was no other flight to Chennai that evening.
Two passengers spent the night in a hotel located 13 kilometers from the airport, while other passengers chose to stay at the airport lounge, according to IndiGo sources at the Bengaluru airport, who verified the occurrence. As to the report, an airline official stated that all of them were flown to Chennai on Monday morning and were accommodated on aircraft.
“On November 19, 2023, flight 6E 478 was operating from Amritsar to Chennai via Bengaluru with eight transit passengers on board,” stated IndiGo in a statement regarding the incident. At Bengaluru Airport, these passengers were unable to join the subsequent flight to Chennai because of the delay of the incoming plane from Amritsar.
