India’s civil-aviation regulators have hauled Air India over the coals after three Italian nationals managed to transit through Delhi’s international terminal and board a Lufthansa flight to Munich without clearing immigration formalities. According to Malayalam daily *Manorama Online*, the passengers had arrived in Delhi on 3 September on an Air India ‘hub-and-spoke’ connection from Amritsar. Their domestic boarding passes were incorrectly treated as Easy-Connect international documents, allowing them to walk straight to Gate 39 and board the onward flight in the early hours of 4 September. The lapse was discovered only during a manual reconciliation of passenger manifests, prompting the Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) to issue a show-cause notice to the Tata-owned carrier on 12 September and to demand an explanation within seven days. A high-level meeting chaired by the Union Home Secretary is expected to review security protocols involving Air India, the Bureau of Immigration and Delhi International Airport Ltd. Industry observers say the incident exposes both training gaps among ground-handling staff and systemic weaknesses in India’s fledgling domestic-to-international transfer model. Corporates that rely on one-stop connections for assignees may now see tighter document checks, longer minimum-connection times and possible suspension of the Easy-Connect facility at secondary airports. For mobility managers, the immediate takeaway is to brief assignees transiting Delhi to re-verify immigration stamps—even if their boarding passes indicate a through-check—until new SOPs are in place.
Source: Manorama Online
