BENGALURU: The collapse of the Departure Control System (DCS) across airports in the country including Bengaluru for nearly an hour delayed the check-in procedure for thousands of flyers leaving from Kempegowda International Airport on Wednesday.
There was a huge rush to leave the City today due to the Republic Day holiday on Thursday and the approaching weekend prompting the airport operator to make it compulsory for all to bring the printed boarding pass to the airport.
People were being checked in manually across KIA, said a top airport source. “Navitaire (Digital platform) was not working from 1.20 pm to 2.19 pm on Wednesday. The DCS at Indigo was restored at 1.40 pm and at Air Asia at 1.51 pm. Akasa Airlines was also impacted. The application got back to normalcy nearly an hour later,” the source explained.
A source from airport operator, Bangalore International Airport Limited confirmed there was a brief issue with the `GoNow’ software, which was rectified later.
However, due to the cascading impact of the glitch, some passengers were affected for more than three hours. Meanwhile, airlines were bombarded with complaints from flyers with one individual drawing a parallel with the railway station due to the huge crowds piling up.
Rajendra kumar, Data Science Engineer at Abu Dhabi, departing from Bengaluru tweeted this: “#BLRAirport #AAI_Official #AkasaAir passengers are standing from last 3 hours for check-in , poor management from Akash airlines. Giving excuses of Server down and doing manual check-in.”
Sumit Sharma, a coder at Dell said, “First fix your existing operations then go for other ones. From more than 1 hour people are waiting in check-in queue at Bengaluru airport and Your staff has no regrets about this Chaos. Who will be responsible for this inconvenience? Will never ever travel in your airline.”
The standard response from Akasa Air to complaints ran thus: “Our systems have been temporarily affected, owing to the global outage at our service provider’s facility, causing certain operational disruptions…”
Another flyer, Sharvil, tweeted that all the check-in counters at Bengaluru airport have come to a standstill for an hour. “Apparently, all Indian airports are facing this issue because of a software failure that airlines use to streamline check-ins and the boarding process called `GoNow’, oh the irony.”
IndiGo claimed their operations were disrupted only for a few minutes.