‘Goa flyers wait for 1 hour to claim bags at airport’
Times of India | 21 March 2024
Kolkata: An inordinate delay in the delivery of baggage on a Goa-Kolkata flight operated by IndiGo Airlines left flyers harried on Monday evening. A passenger, who had arrived on the flight, said passengers were made to wait for 50 minutes before the first baggage arrived. No airline staff was available to explain the reason for the delay.
The airline said the delay had been caused due to operation constraints at Kolkata airport but did not elaborate on the problem.
“A tractor used to transport the trolleys carrying luggage that belonged to another airline developed a snag on the pathway that leads to the basement where the luggage are loaded on to the conveyor belt. Hence, the IndiGo tractor carrying luggage from the Goa flight was held up as pathway was blocked,” an airline official said. Flyer Anirudh Kharkia, who had arrived on flight 6E0612, said the aircraft touched down at Kolkata airport at 5.54 pm on Monday. “When passengers moved to baggage retrieval belt number 4 at Kolkata airport, it took over 50 minutes for the first baggage to arrive,” he said.According to Kharkia, though the information panel showed that baggage delivery had been completed at 6.47 pm, he and several others were still waiting for their luggage.
As per the DGCA mandate, the first baggage should arrive at the baggage belt within 10 minutes of shutting off the aircraft engine and the last bag should be at the belt within 30 minutes.
Airlines and ground handling agencies had earlier identified several issues, including absence of enough trolley tractors to ferry the bags from the aircraft belly to the conveyor belt, absence of porters, problems in seamless availability of baggage trays, delay in bags arriving by international flights due to checks at the X-ray scanners, manned by customs officers and tripping of the belt in operation.