Flight delays are as common as they are frustrating. While these are often blamed on ¡®technical snags¡¯, Vistara seems to have come across a couple of ecological snags.
Two Vistara Airlines aircraft parked in the same bay on Kolkata airport, 16 hours apart, were hijacked by swarms of bees, causing both flights to get delayed by an hour each, according to Times Of India.?
On Sunday evening at around 4:00 pm just before the boarding of the Delhi-bound Vistara flight was about to commence, bees seemingly took a fancy to the aircraft and made themselves comfortable on its exterior. As a result, boarding was halted and fire services were called to tackle the situation.
¡°Within minutes, lakhs of bees had settled on the plane as though ready to build a hive. Water jets had to be sprayed for a good 30 minutes to dislodge them. The flight ultimately took off at 6.30pm instead of 5.30pm,¡± TOI quoted an airline official as saying.
However, it seems the bees were not yet done with Vistara, because on Monday morning, the bees were found atop another aircraft of the same airlines, even though a number of other planes were also parked nearby. The swarm was so thick, that at one point, it partially covered the lettering on the airplane.?
This Port-Blair-bound flight that was scheduled to take off at 10:30 am could leave only around 11:30 am, once the firefighters had hosed the plane down with water cannons.?
Kolkata airport director Kaushik Bhattacharjee said that keeping in mind the back to back incidents, the airport¡¯s grounds and the terminal¡¯s exterior were checked for any hives that might be present - and none were found - and an insecticide was also sprayed as a precautionary measure.
A similar incident had also happened in September of 2019, when an Air India flight to Agartala was held up by a swarm of bees that perched on the cockpit¡¯s window.?
Given that the incidents happened around the same time this year and the last, it¡¯s being speculated that it might be a migrating swarm making an unscheduled stop.