JEDDAH: An Air India pilots’ strike, which entered its third day on Monday, had its impact on passengers from Saudi Arabia with cancellations of a number of incoming and outgoing flights.
A flight from Mumbai, which was scheduled to arrive in Jeddah late Monday night, was canceled and so the outgoing flight from Jeddah to Delhi at 1:55 a.m. on Tuesday stood canceled, an airline official said.
“We are trying to combine the load of Monday night’s Jeddah-Hyderabad-Mumbai flight with that of the Delhi load. The flight, which is likely to be delayed by a couple of hours, will go to Delhi and arrangements will then be made to take the rest of the passengers to their respective destinations,” he added.
Asked about the fate of passengers on flights to and from the Kingdom on Tuesday onward, he said: “We are making arrangements to enable them fly on other international carriers.”
Air India operates 46 flights a week from the Kingdom — 16 each from Riyadh and Dammam, and 14 from Jeddah.
The strike has caused discomfort and inconvenience to thousands of passengers across India and overseas.
“We kept on calling them (Air India and travel agencies) to know about the flight schedule. If they had told us yesterday itself, we would have canceled the flight and made arrangements on some other airline,” P.K. Shuaib, a passenger heading for Delhi, told Arab News on Monday. “They went on telling us, the flight schedule was normal. But today, it was canceled. Now, we are in great difficulty and are trying to get on some other flight,” he added.
Air India passengers across the Kingdom, within India and elsewhere in the world met the same fate and had a torturous time due to cancellations.
According to reports from New Delhi, the agitating pilots have threatened to intensify their strike after talks between them and the airline management failed to resolve the impasse on Monday.
