New Delhi: Aviation regulator Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) on Friday imposed a ₹10 lakh fine on Go First airline for leaving 55 passengers behind at the Bengaluru airport on January 9, saying that it “failed to ensure adequate arrangement for ground handling”.
The low-cost carrier’s flight G8-116 took off for Delhi from Bengaluru’s Kempegowda International Airport around 6.30 am, leaving 55 passengers stranded in the shuttle bus. A day after the incident, Go First issued an apology and derostered the staff involved in the incident, pending an inquiry.
In a statement issued on Friday, DGCA said: “The airline failed to ensure adequate arrangement for ground handling, preparation of load and trim sheet, flight dispatch and passenger/cargo handling and therefore, enforcement action in the form of Financial Penalty of ₹10 lakh has been imposed for violation of CAR (civil aviation requirement).”
Meanwhile, the airline had apologised in a statement soon after the incident, saying that it was “caused due to an inadvertent oversight”. “Passengers were accommodated on alternate airlines to Delhi and onward to other destinations,” it said in a statement issued on January 10.
It also announced a free ticket for affected travellers. “In line with our philosophy of customer centricity, the airline has decided to offer all affected passengers one free ticket for travel on any domestic sector in the next 12 months,” the airline spokesperson had said.
DGCA, however, sought an incident report from the airline, which was submitted on January 25. “Perusal of reply of Go First reveals that there was improper communication, coordination between terminal coordinator (TC), commercial staff and crew regarding boarding of passengers in the aircraft,” DGCA stated.
This is the third such penalty the DGCA has imposed on an airline within eight days. On January 24, the regulator imposed a fine of ₹10 lakh on Air India for not reporting two incidents of unruly passenger behaviour onboard a Paris-New Delhi flight on December 6, 2022. On January 20, a penalty of ₹30 lakh was imposed on Air India for not reporting about the unruly behaviour of a passenger on its New York-Delhi flight on November 26, 2022, when a drunk passenger allegedly urinated on a woman passenger.
