Whenever we are traveling, the only thing on our mind is to have a pleasant and safe journey. However, passengers aboard Singapore Airlines Flight SQ 516 on June 8 had an extremely unpleasant and a traumatic experience. This flight to Kolkata landed at its destination hours past its scheduled time and the reason for which was non-functional air conditioning systems. With almost 400 passengers on board and no ventilation, the passengers were made to suffer for 3 hours till the time the engineers came and repaired the ACs. To add to the grief, it is being alleged that the crew members were rude and unhelpful.

One of the passengers, Chandni Doulatramani, who was traveling with her two elderly parents, recounted the experience on her Facebook Post.

“On the 8th of June, I was flying back via Singapore Airlines (SQ 516) to Calcutta with my parents (both senior citizens) and younger sister from Brisbane. We had a layover in Singapore and after six hours of being in transit, we were ready to board our flight that was scheduled to take off at 9.10pm Singapore time. We were put on a bus that would take us to our aircraft. With very few seats available and all taken, the majority of us were standing. The driver started the bus, moved it by half an inch, and then got off the bus. He repeated this four times. Everytime we thought we were going to leave, he got off. It was about 30 minutes we had been trapped inside with no explanation, no reasons. My 73 year-old father and many other senior citizens and toddlers were extremely uncomfortable and physically exhausted just standing there in oblivion. Some of us frantically knocked on the door and windows and the driver of the bus shrugged from the outside as if to say “I have no idea what’s going on, don’t yell at me” until one lady from the ground staff (who was earlier anxiously ushering everyone onto the bus as if we were school children or an uneducated lot) came to the bus to ask us to calm down. Some of us, including me, lost our cool at her and yelled at her until she let us off the bus and wait at the terminal. 20 minutes later we were asked to board the aircraft. It was now 9.30pm.

Upon boarding, we were told that the airconditioning in the aircraft was not working and it would be fixed within fifteen minutes. Every five minutes the captain kept giving us live updates on the PA system — “the engineer is on his way”, “the engineer is here and it will be fixed soon”, “please bear with us, the temperature will increase for ten minutes before it starts cooling”. Everyone waited patiently until we realised this wasn’t going to get fixed anytime soon. Half an hour had passed with zero ventilation in an aircraft full of passengers. An airhostess at some point told me the aircraft hasn’t been in use for a long time and so the airconditioning was not working. A pregnant lady had gotten so sick she was getting hot flashes and no amount of water splashing helped. Two other women were profusely throwing up in the back of the plane. Everyone was sweating. It was 31 degrees in Singapore and very humid. When we confronted the cabin crew, they had no answers, rudely shut us up, threatened to call the cops to arrest us, and said “we are in the same situation as you are, don’t ask us, we don’t know anything”. If we won’t ask them then who are we supposed to ask? They were not letting us deboard the plane and they weren’t being able to immediately fix the airconditioning problem and they weren’t able to give us any answers. Passengers were using the safety card to fan themselves. Two doctors (a senior citizen couple who had to board the aircraft from another wing in wheelchairs) from my apartment building in Calcutta were on the same plane. When I went to them asking for help for people throwing up, I saw that the gentleman had gotten so sick he had to take off all his clothes and sit in a mere vest. Like us, they were traveling from Australia where it’s anywhere between 6 and 9 degrees right now. The airline didn’t let anybody go. We were being treated like prisoners, being asked to sit in our seats and wear our seatbelts. They told us if we were going to offload ourselves then we wouldn’t be allowed back in and they would put us on another plane which was two days later and they wouldn’t compensate us for any of it. The airline did NOTHING to make us comfortable. They refused us cold water and drinks until much later when we gathered around the pantry demanding for fizz drinks to feel better. My dad, who has a major dehydration problem, felt suffocated and claustrophobic. The pilot kept announcing that they we are about to fly “soon” but nothing happened. Three times the ground police came to our aircraft to understand the problem and did nothing about it despite people crying for help. It seemed like they were just called in to distract us. Later, when the pilot announced they were ready to go, the airconditioning had still not started. Everyone was nervous. When I raised…