Close to 50 Telugu families are currently stranded at the Aktobe airport in Kazakhstan from Thursday morning after the Air India flight (191) from Mumbai to Newark (New Jersey, United States) made an emergency landing.
Passengers noticed white smoke from the left wing five hours after the takeoff and alerted the crew.
Immediately, the pilot issued a warning signal made a landing at Aktobe airport. Everyone was asleep when the announcement came and the pilot was calm and landed the plane smoothly, said one of the passengers, M. Venkat, contacting through whatsapp.
“We landed at the airport within 15 minutes of the announcement. We are right now inside the airport waiting for the last six hours for the replacement aircraft to arrive from Delhi. They served us soup and bread from the airport kitchen. Luckily, my mother has packed lemon rice for us,” he said.
Mr. Venkat, his family of four including wife and two daughters along with his brother M. Venu’s family of wife, two boys and a girl, who came to Hyderabad for a wedding, along with several other Telugu passengers flew from Hyderabad to Mumbai on Wednesday night to catch the Newark flight scheduled to start from 2.30 a.m.
He said there could be about 300 passengers and crew on the flight and the staff of airline and airport was doing the best they could do at the moment. “We landed at Aktobe airport at about 8 a.m. and I am not sure if we will be moved into the hotel before the replacement flight arrives at 10 p.m. as has been indicated to us,” he said.
While there was no panic among the passengers, everyone is weary and the fatigue gets compounded without proper sleep and a good shower for several hours now. “I guess we would be delayed by at least a day to our destination if everything goes as per plan,” Mr. Venkat added.
The IT professional immediately sent a message to his relatives in Erragadda here. “We received a message from my son stating that there was an emergency landing and everything is fine. We are hoping to hear from them as soon as they land in US,” said his father Mr. M. Ramu Sarma, a retired State Government official.
