Air India 'hijack': Sounded alert after passengers threatened me with physical assault, says woman pilot

The commander of the Air India flight whose cockpit was reportedly stormed by irate passengers at the Trivandrum airport on October 18 has said that the passengers had threatened her with physical assault.

"The pilots and crew were held hostage, not allowed water and restroom breaks and criminally intimidated for over five hours," Rupali Waghmare, the flight commander has stated in a First Information Report(FIR) filed with the Kerala police.

None of the seven Central Industrial Security Force(CISF) personnel who stood on the tarmac around the aircraft intervened to help, Waghmare said in a detailed letter sent to the Commissioner of Security in the Bureau of Civil Aviation and Security on October 21, three days after the incident.

A copy of this letter is with India Today.

According to Waghmare, a group of passengers repeatedly assaulted the aircraft crew and a woman cabin-in-charge while trying to barge into the flight deck. They were insistent that Rupali Waghmare and her crew only fly them back to Cochin.

The Abu Dhabi-Cochin flight was diverted to Trivandrum due to bad weather at 6.40 am. Waghmare and her crew requested the passengers to deplane while a fresh flight crew took them back to Cochin.

Waghmare recounted the exact sequence of events that led her to sound the hijack distress warning. The pilots made frantic, but futile, calls to Air India.

Waghmare then scribbled a note for the CISF and threw it out of the cockpit window because an Air India security staff said the CISF would not act without the flight commander's authorisation.

There was, however, no response from either the air traffic control or the CISF despite eight to ten calls made to them over two hours. Meanwhile, the passengers pushed aside the flight crew and entered the cockpit screaming they would kill the pilots if they did not fly them to Cochin.

"One of the passengers looked at me and said 'we are coming and that we are going to do the wrong thing to you'," she wrote in the letter.
Fearing for her personal safety, Waghmare transmitted the code 7700-the international hijack warning-through the transponder.

Since the aircraft was deemed to be 'in flight' when the incident took place, she had acted under the provisions of the International Civil Aviation Organisation(ICAO) to protect the aircraft and passengers.

She has requested the BCAS to advise the Kerala government to have the incident investigated by a Class I police officer and recommended the severest punishment for the guilty.

Source: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/air-india-hijack-alert-woman-pilot-physical-assault/1/225922.html

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