- Sunday, March 02, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
Passenger trouble continues to haunt Air India as one its London-bound flights returned to Delhi early on Monday (10) after an unruly flyer allegedly harmed two members of the cabin crew.
Confirming the news the same day, Air India said the person was deboarded and a police case was registered.
In a statement, the Tata-owned carrier said that the flight to London’s Heathrow Airport returned shortly after taking off due to “serious unruly behaviour of a passenger”.
“Not heeding to verbal and written warnings, the passenger continued with unruly behaviour including causing physical harm to two of the cabin crew members. The pilot in command decided to return to Delhi and the passenger was handed over to the security personnel upon landing. An FIR (first information report) has also been lodged with the police,” it said, according to NDTV.
Later, family members of the passenger said he was not stable mentally.
Air India’s statement, which stressed that “safety, security and dignity” of everyone on board is important, added that the airline regretted the inconvenience caused to the passengers and rescheduled the flight to London in the afternoon.
The Air India Boeing 787 had taken off at 6.35 am local time and returned to Delhi at 9.42 am local time, according to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation, India’s civil aviation regulator.
It is also investigating the incident, according to the NDTV report.
Popular aviation flight tracker app Flightradar24 indicated that the aircraft changed course to return to India when it was flying near Peshawar in Pakistan.
In February this year, Air India CEO Campbell Wilson said in an interview that airline crew often suffer physical and verbal abuse while on duty.
“Not a day goes by without us receiving reports about passenger behaviour. There is a degradation of passenger behaviour onboard aircraft and a standard of decorum is required,” he was quoted as saying.
Last November, a drunk man urinated on an elderly woman co-passenger on board an Air India flight while flying from New York to Delhi. The episode sparked a massive debate on passengers’ conduct, prompting airlines to issue stern guidelines to tackle unruly fliers.
Earlier this month, a drunk Swedish national was arrested by the police in Mumbai for allegedly molesting a cabin crew on board a plane of IndiGo, India’s largest carrier, flying from Bangkok to Mumbai.
