BENGALURU: Kempegowda International Airport (KIA) operator Bangalore International Airport Limited tried to play down the issue of the baggage system failure on Sunday by claiming in an official statement that it was set right within 15 minutes. But the reality came to the fore on Monday morning when flyers on Indigo flights continued to suffer massive delays for the second consecutive day. The baggage issue was finally set right by 12.20 pm but as a cascading effect, flights continued to be delayed most of Monday.
Flights of all airlines, barring Indigo, were operated as per schedule. Indigo was bombarded on social media with complaints from harried flyers whose flights were yet to take off or who had landed at various airports without their baggage.
Giving details of why Indigo was specifically impacted, a source told TNIE that only Indigo had a separate baggage screening procedure with dedicated baggage screening belts in a space earmarked as BMA area. "Due to the heavy load on the baggage system, it suffered a failure. Two of the baggage belts were impacted. Indigo operates the maximum number of flights from Bengaluru and hence had this sophisticated system in place. All the other airlines have a normal system in place," he said.
Another source said that a daily average of 120-plus flights from Indigo presently depart from the airport. "Its punctuality figures on Sunday and Monday were extremely bad. A majority of these flights were delayed by a minimum of three to four hours. Other airlines operating a lesser number of flights did not have any issues."
What is appalling though is that both BIAL and Indigo finally put out tweets alerting passengers about the baggage issue on their official handles only on Monday morning, a full day after much chaos at Bengaluru airport. They were only responding to individual tweets the previous day.
Indigo declined to give any fresh statement about the issue on Monday despite repeated requests. BIAL in a statement said, "A technical issue in the Baggage Handling System had disrupted baggage sortation at Benglauru airport on October 31 and the first half of November 1. This has had an impact on the flights of Indigo airlines. The baggage sortation issue has been resolved at 1220 hrs today, 1 November 2021. Bengaluru airport is extending all its support to Indigo to manage the situation and is working closely with the airline to ensure that the misconnected bags reach passengers," it said.
It has been reliably learnt that the equipment had been purchased from abroad by BIAL and hence it had to be set right only with technical assistance from there, which was the reason for the delay in rectifying it.