At that point, he sought out the lead cabin crew member, showed her his airport entry pass and she explained that they did not have the cockpit crew. There was no one to fly the aircraft. She said that she and her cabin crew members had very little clue on what to expect as nobody was answering their calls and they had received no concrete information. Unlike Jet Airways which always had robust contingency plans in place and within 15-20 minutes, its operations control centre would have a solution, Air India clearly flew its own kite, whatever that was, he thought to himself.

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By 12.30 p.m., two and a half hours after boarding, passengers began to get a bit restless. One enterprising lady who had by now understood that Sam was a senior pilot suggested that he flies the aircraft as she had found a co-pilot among the other passengers. Her logic was simple: he was a seasoned captain and here was a co-pilot so they had the cockpit crew in the aircraft itself. Why not just take off and end everyone’s misery, she said to him.

It was at this stage that Sam put on his second hat as chief of the airline line pilots association (ALPA) head and asked on their WhatsApp group for cockpit crew details for the flight. He learnt that the commander due to fly their airplane had come in from Chennai, circled over Delhi (due to the storm) and finally had been diverted to Bhopal. He would now take a return flight from Bhopal to Delhi and then was supposed to command their aircraft to Bengaluru.

A quick calculation indicated that the pilot would hit the flight timing duty limits. Near the aerobridge - which was bolted from the terminal end - there were only two security personnel, no ground staff of the airline was available to answer any queries. The cabin crew was holding fort on its own, bereft of any clear instructions from seniors.

Meanwhile, a Delhi bigwig on board called all the powers-that-be and claimed that they were in the process of dispatching cockpit crew since he was on board and had used his connections to ensure that things fell into place quickly. By then, the time was around 2.00 a.m. and Sam told his co-passengers that he didn’t think they would get a cockpit crew before 5 a.m. when the next day’s rotation and roster began.

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By now, small groups and a few solo passengers were reaching their limits of patience (just like cabin and cockpit crew do) and were walking up and down the aerobridge, agitated. An elderly couple was moved from economy to business and offered medicine to help them cope. The man seated next to Sam had been “losing it” and most of his time was spent in calming him down. He kept threatening that he would “not spare Air India” and eventually called 100 and told the cops that he was being held hostage in the “parking”, without specifying that it was the aircraft parking bay not the car parking. Duty-bound, the police explored the car parking at T3 and, expectedly, found no hostages.

By now, many were resigned to their fate, walking up and down the aircraft and at 3.45 p.m - over 5 hours after boarding - an Air India official came to say that they could deboard, have breakfast in the terminal and then leave. The airline would offer them coupons and tell them how to proceed, something the angry passengers flatly refused, arguing that they would have picked this option had it

been conveyed to them a few hours earlier and were spared the ordeal they went through. But, now, they were not willing to budge. Meanwhile, the existing cabin crew - who had managed to get the passengers to their side with empathetic handling - had also hit its duty timing limits and could not operate as per DGCA rules.

Things carried on like this with different passengers losing it at different points and calling all and sundry on their mobile phones, mostly to no avail. At 7.30 a.m., the cockpit crew finally arrived but by then the aircraft toilets were full and dirty and cleaners were required. A new set of cabin crew came in but they soon realised that the aircraft had run out of water and didn’t have cutlery. Dirty toilets, no water and no cutlery meant more time on the ground before the flight was ready for takeoff.

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Even as the restocking and cleansing took place - although not simultaneously - the airline staff began to check all the boarding passes once again and two security personnel came inside the aircraft and said that passengers had to verify their hand luggage since one or two passengers with international connections to board had deboarded earlier. This caused more mayhem among an already furious cohort and the passengers who had developed a sort of camaraderie had to be mollified by Sam, who explained that Indian security regulations - absurd or not - required the hand luggage to be verified if the aircraft failed to take off within three hours of its allotted time slot. Finally, the flight with a set of red eyed and mentally exhausted passengers took off just past 8 a.m., roughly 10 hours after they boarded Air India 2412.

The purpose of this detailed description, which is by no means an isolated instance, is to give the Air India senior management a taste of what regular fliers endured that night, thanks to their incompetence and callousness, while they remain in deep slumber, both literally and figuratively. It’s time for some real introspection.