To carry passengers commercially, an airline obtains a Scheduled Operator's Permit (SOP) from the DGCA. Under this permit, an airline is legally bound to follow its flight time-table at all costs. It can cancel a flight schedule only in case of bad weather or if the aircraft develops a technical problem.
"It is only then that accommodating passengers on different flights comes into the picture. In this case, Air India did not have another aircraft to operate at the Delhi-Coimbatore flight 7603 at the scheduled hour of 5.20am on Tuesday. So it should not have diverted it's aircraft, which was to operate flight 7603, for a charter flight. The matter is about violating the SOP permit," said a DGCA top official.
A passenger has a choice of many airlines and when he books a ticket on a particular airline he cannot be moved onto another flight just so that the airline can operate a charter flight with the particular aircraft instead, he added. In fact, there have been instances of even 15-16 hour ultra-long haul flights operating with only a handful of passengers so as to keep the schedule.
"Even if not a single passenger is booked on the flight, it has to leave at the scheduled hour," the official added.
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