Passengers fly into rage, woman pilot cries ‘hijack’

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A hijack scare sounded by an Air India Express flight commander led to dramatic scenes at the airport here and at Nedumbassery in Kerala on Friday, putting 165 passengers, including women and infants, to a harrowing eight hours.

Six passengers, who led the protests, were frisked at Thiruvananthapuram airport and were questioned after they landed at Nedumbassery airport. As co-passengers threatened not to leave, the airport officials let them go.

Passengers said the trouble started when Air India Express flight IX 4522 commander Rupali Wagmare decided to sign off, leaving the rest of the crew and passengers on the flight at Thiruvananthapuram airport.

The flight from Abu Dhabi, scheduled to land at Kochi at 3.30 am, was already delayed and had to be diverted to Thiruvananthapuram owing to bad weather. It landed in Thiruvananthapuram at 6.40am.

There was no word of the impending delay and passengers waited patiently for the flight to take off for Kochi till 8.40 a.m.

Commander Rupali Wagmare then announced that her duty was over and that passengers could alight and proceed to Kochi by road since the airline had not made any alternative arrangements.
DGP K.G. Balasubraman-ian said the commander complained that a few passengers had stepped into the cockpit, threatening to kill her if she did not take off for Kochi.

The commander pressed the hijack alert code ‘7500’ on the transponder following the tiff with the passengers. Subsequently the emergency security rules of the airport were invoked, CISF personnel and local police entered the aircraft, and shifted the passengers to a bus.

An attempt to take some passengers into custody was resisted. While the commander complained that some passengers tried to barge into the cockpit, passengers said it was a baseless charge.

The issue was sorted out after the emergency response committees at the airport and the Director General of Civil Aviation Security headquarters reviewed the situation.

The flight took off for Kochi by around 2 p.m. with another crew. Finally, when the flight landed in Kochi, six passengers were detained by CISF for about 10 minutes, adding to the commotion. Chief minister Oommen Chandy has directed the DGP to probe the incident.

“We only insisted that we be flown to Kochi as many of us are from the north Kerala districts. We were already complaining about the three-hour delay in Abu Dhabi,” said Premji Philip, one of the passengers who headed for Tiruvalla.

Wagmare has given a petition to the DGP, based on which the Valiyathura police registered a case against six passengers but did not invoke stringent anti-hijack provisions.