Telugu families stranded at Kazakhstan airport

An Air India flight carrying over 300 people from Mumbai to Newark — many of them families from Andhra Pradesh and Telangana — was diverted to Kazakhstan on Thursday after fumes in the cargo hold triggered a fire alarm. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj said all passengers were safe and a relief aircraft was already on its way from New Delhi to ferry the stranded passengers to Newark.

“Our Ambassador Shri Harsh K Jain has informed me that all passengers are safe. There is no reason for worry,” Swaraj said in a tweet. The Boeing 777-300 ER plane landed at the Aktobe international airport in Kazakhstan at around 8 a.m.

“Everyone was asleep when the announcement [of the emergency landing] came and the pilot was calm and landed the plane smoothly,” said one of the passengers, M. Venkat, in a WhatsApp message to his family in Erragadda here.

“We landed at the airport within 15 minutes of the announcement. We are right now inside the airport; [we have been] waiting for the last six hours for the replacement aircraft to arrive from Delhi. They served us soup and bread from the airport kitchen,” Mr Venkat said.

Mr. Venkat and IT professional, his wife and two daughters, along with his brother M. Venu’s family of wife, two boys and a girl, had come to Hyderabad for a wedding.

Along with several other Telugu passengers, they took off from Hyderabad to Mumbai on Wednesday night to catch the Newark flight scheduled to depart at 2.30 a.m.

He said the airline and airport staff were doing the best they could for the around 300 passengers and crew.

“I guess we would be delayed by at least a day to our destination if everything goes as per plan,” Mr. Venkat added, before signing off to conserve his phone’s battery.

An airline source said that fire alarm was set off after fumes were detected from the cargo hold of the plane.

SOURCE: PTI