Indian passenger misses flight after falling asleep

Recently it was reported in Madrid that a man who missed his Ryanair flight leapt from a disconnected gangway before running across the runway of Madrid Airport, bag in hand, trying to hail the plane down. As one of the airline crew said, "he ran pretty well." The plane did not stop for him though. A passenger in Mumbai airport missed a flight, on the contrary, by sleeping through the proceedings.

Vishal Kumar slept rather comfortably on the back seat of an airport shuttle bus and missed his flight. It's perhaps an indication of the security lapses in Indian airports that the sleeping passenger was not detected for six hours.

Neither the security staff nor the airline crew found nothing amiss--though the passenger had cleared controls and checked in--in the flight plan till a bus driver noticed that the there was somebody gesticulating wildly in a locked up shuttle bus, oblivious to the mayhem he had created. The incident occurred on June 4, late night.

The police and Bureau for Civil Aviation Security were informed about the lapses. The airport security is directly handled by the Central Industrial Security Force.

Vishal Kumar was scheduled to board an IndiGo flight (6E 799) to Bengaluru from Mumbai airport's domestic terminal. Like other passengers, he too boarded the shuttle at about 6.30pm. The back seat was empty. He stretched comfortably on it and went to sleep. At the ladder point all passengers except Kumar deboarded.

The unsuspecting driver on his part drove the vehicle back to the maintenance area and parked it there. Normally this oversight would have been caught at the ladder point when the crew have to tally their manifest and the passengers' boarding cards. Well, they missed it.

"The boarding pass is checked at the boarding gate and then airlines are supposed to check it at the ladder point as well," said a CISF official. The CISF was called in at midnight when the alert driver noticed the passenger locked up in the shuttle. He informed the control room.

In his statement to the airport authorities, a bewildered Kumar said he had woken up after four or five hours . But he found the bus parked in a far corner and its doors locked. He said he tried to make loud noises to attract attention. Nobody seemed interested, he said. He subsequently boarded another flight. But this time he took care not to sleep, he later said

.Source: Khaleej Times