Mumbai:
An Ahmedabad-bound SpiceJet plane made a landing under emergency conditions in Mumbai after a passengers fell ill because of lack of air conditioning on the aircraft, but passengers are livid, they say SpiceJet chose to fly the plane despite several complaints.
The flight took off with 170 passengers from Bangalore at 5.30 pm on Monday, almost one-and-a-half hours late.
Its route ahead was a good eight-hour journey, rather long for domestic routes. Yet the flight took off with no air-conditioning.
"When we complained about the heat, we were told the AC is not functioning. They assured us that once the flight takes off, it will work. But after 10 minutes, we were perspiring and it was intolerable. At Goa, passengers protested forcing the plane to return to the hangar. But again, 10 minutes later, it took off. The AC was still not working,'' said Vinod Agarwal, a passenger.
So intolerable was the heat that the passengers began fanning themselves with instruction pamphlets. Some of them even took their shirts off.
Feeling suffocated, a foreign tourist got off at Goa.
Then a young man got breathless and the flight had to make an emergency landing in Mumbai.
''We were scared. The fear was that if the AC is not working, could there be other technical failures. Because of lack of oxygen one person fainted. He had to be put on an oxygen cylinder. A lady passenger from Norway, a doctor, attended to him till we emergency landed in Bombay,'' said Anil Sharma, another passenger.
At Ahmedabad, external generators were installed to get some cool air into the cabins. Then the much-delayed flight left for Jaipur.
''We were treated like animals. We were literally held hostage,'' Anil Sharma added.
By the time the flight arrived at its final destination, it was three hours behind schedule and passengers from Bangalore had been aboard for nearly 10 hours.