New Delhi: A woman passenger of IndiGo was injured after she fell from a wheelchair while being ferried by its staffer at the Lucknow airport, triggering a spat with the AAI terming the reasons given by the airline as “incorrect”. Two days after the incident, the airline on Monday claimed that the mishap happened due to crack in the floor at the airport, drawing retort from the AAI which said it all happened because of “gross negligence of IndiGo staff”.
In an unusual move, state-owned AAI issued two statements about the incident, which happened at around 8 pm on Saturday at the Lucknow airport. The latest incident comes days after IndiGo came under fire and apologised following the surfacing of a video of a passenger being manhandled at the Delhi airport. In a statement, an IndiGo spokesperson apologised for the mishap involving the passenger Urvashi Parikh Viren. “Our IndiGo representative was pushing her wheelchair towards the arrival hall. As he was guiding her wheelchair through a vehicular lane, which was dimly lit at that time of the night, her wheelchair got stuck in a deep crack on the tarmac and lost balance and she fell off her wheelchair,” the spokesperson said.
According to the airline, the passenger was “injured” and was immediately rushed to the doctor of the AAI and was administered first aid. In a late Monday evening statement, an AAI spokesperson said it would like to put on record that “the reasons given by IndiGo of the wheelchair getting stuck into the crack on the road and claims of dim light are not correct as there is no crack on the tarmac and the area (baggage makeup area, near the airside conveyor belt) has sufficient illumination.”
Earlier in the day, AAI in a statement said that as per investigations, the incident happened due to “gross negligence of IndiGo staff as he chose the wrong path on the tarmac and mishandled the passenger”. Without mentioning the word “gross negligence” in the second statement, the AAI provided a sequence of events that led to the woman passenger on IndiGo’s Mumbai-Lucknow flight (6E-446) getting injured. “The IndiGo loader ferrying the passenger in wheelchair, went in the wrong path by taking a short cut ignoring the defined path,” the AAI said. In a statement, IndiGo said “she (Viren) was kind enough to say that it wasn’t a human error and we should deal with the staff with empathy, when we de-brief our loader.”
