Pune: Nearly 200 passengers were allegedly forced to stick to their seats in an Air India Express flight for over seven hours on Friday. The Delhi-Pune flight was delayed by seven and a half hours, and the passengers were asked to go through security checks twice. Flyers alleged that they requested the crew to let all the passengers, including senior citizens, rest in the terminal building until the operations started. However, the same was denied by the crew till 5:30 am The flight (IX-1176) was supposed to take off from Delhi at 9.40pm on Friday, and the landing was scheduled at 11.50pm in Pune. However, the plane did not take off until 7.30 am on Saturday and landed in Pune around 10 am, which is more than 10 hours late that the scheduled arrival time, reported . The situation broke out in chaos and confusion, with flyers asking the reason for the delay. In a response, the flyers were told that the fog caused low visibility, disrupting the flight operations. Later they were asked to deboard at the Delhi Airport only on account of technical glitch."At first, the flight was delayed by half-an-hour. All the passengers boarded and settled down in the plane by 10pm on Friday. However, the flight did not take off, even though an hour had passed. Flyers asked the crew about the issue, and they were told that visibility was a major problem because of fog. Some flyers also lost their patient after sitting in the aircraft for more than two hours," said Pune resident Ambadas Gawande, quoted by the media report.Upon objecting to the inconvenience multiple times, the crew asked the flyers to be seated as the flight would take off soon. "But it never happened. Passengers, mostly senior citizens, wanted to return to the terminal building to rest comfortably, but they were not allowed to. There were several arguments between the flyers and the crew. We all understood that the aircraft wouldn't take-off because of the fog. But there was no logic behind keeping us seated in the plane for more than seven hours," he said.

‘Asked to Get Down, Go through Security Check AGAIN’Gawande added that the crew members asked us to get down from the plane at 5.30am on Saturday due to some technical issue. “The crew suddenly asked to deboard the flight citing some technical glitches. It was 5.30am on Saturday. From there, we were huddled into buses, and the vehicles moved around the area for a while, finally dropping us at the terminal building. Then we were told to go through the security check again. The whole thing took around two hours. Surprisingly, we boarded the same aircraft again," Gawande added.