A Qatar Airways flight to Doha returned without any passenger from Dr Babasaheb Ambedkdar International Airport, Nagpur on Monday that too after a delay of nearly four hours. The flight took off at 7 am.
Passengers were made to board at a city hotel. They finally flew for Doha on the Tuesday. According to sources, Qatar Airways’ flight number QR 591 from Nagpur to Doha was ready to take off on its scheduled time at 3.40 am when it developed a technical snag. The pilot immediately informed the technical staff about it.
Soon, a team of engineers attended the aircraft. After two hours they find the glitch and it took as many hours more to fix it. However, the drama was not over. After four hours when the aircraft’s technical snag was fixed and it was ready to take off, pilots refused to fly.
Even the cabin crew refused to board the aircraft. They said, their duty hours are over and they won’t be working extra. Though the airlines had pilots to fly the flight at Nagpur but there was not arrangement in place for cabin crew. Hence, it was decided to cancel the flight.
The back-up pilots then flew to Doha at 7 am sans passengers. Nearly 70 passengers had booked ticket. Those who hailed from Nagpur returned home while arrangements were made for others at city hotel.
It is pertinent to note here that Qatar Airways use Airbus 320 with a seating capacity of 180. It was assumed that the flight was cancelled because number of passengers was not even half of its total seating capacity.
However, all these speculations were not true as the aircraft was flown to Doha without passengers and cabin crew.
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