SAS returned to India after 17 years, but its first Copenhagen – Mumbai flight did not quite make it to India, turning back after four hours in the air due to missing final regulatory approval.
SAS Returns To India After 17 Years, Then First Flight Turns Back To Copenhagen
SAS has returned to India after a 17-year absence, but the relaunch did not go as planned.
The inaugural Copenhagen (CPH) – Mumbai (BOM) flight departed about four hours late, then turned around after roughly four hours in the air and returned to Copenhagen. According to Flightradar24, the aircraft made it as far as Azerbaijan airspace before heading back.
The reason? It wasn’t weather or a mechanical issue. No unruly passenger or medical emergency.
SAS told the Times of India that the flight returned because a final regulatory approval from relevant authorities had not been secured before the aircraft reached Indian airspace.
That is not exactly the triumphant relaunch SAS had in mind!
A Rough Start For An Important Route
Copenhagen – Mumbai marks SAS’ return to India after 17 years, and the airline is operating the service with Airbus A330 aircraft. It is also part of SAS’ attempt to rebuild its longhaul network under SkyTeam and strengthen Copenhagen as a more useful global hub.
India is a logical market for SAS. There is strong business demand and strong so-called VFR (visiting-friends-and-relatives) demand, and Copenhagen can work as a connecting point between India and Scandinavia or parts of Northern Europe.
But this is a very poor first impression.
Passengers boarded a flight to Mumbai and instead got an eight-hour flight to nowhere, ending where they started. That is frustrating under any circumstances, but especially on an inaugural flight celebrating a major longhaul return…
How Does This Happen?
I do not know who dropped the ball here, but if the reported reason is accurate, this is obviously the sort of problem that should be fully sorted before passengers board the aircraft. International flying requires overflight rights, landing approvals, slot coordination, security approvals, and other paperwork that most passengers never think about…things that SAS says it spent months working on. But it appears that final approval, even if generally a mere formality, was never granted.
If a final approval was missing, of course SAS did the right thing once the issue became clear. But the fact that the flight departed Copenhagen in the first place raises the obvious question: why was this not resolved before takeoff?
CONCLUSION
SAS’ first flight back to India in 17 years turned into an embarrassing false start, with the Copenhagen – Mumbai inaugural returning to Copenhagen after about four hours in the air due to missing final regulatory approval.
This does not mean the route is doomed: Copenhagen – Mumbai still makes sense, and SAS should be able to recover from this quickly once the paperwork issue is resolved, though it says it may take a few days.
But for passengers on the inaugural flight, this was a miserable start: a long delay, an eight-hour flight to nowhere, and no India at the end of it. Not exactly the welcome-back-to-India moment SAS was hoping for…
Someone(s) should be fired! How could all of the regulatory items not be checked? Embarrassing…
More importantly: All those passengers deserve a refund or rebooking, and, in addition, maximum EU261 compensation (650 Euros each). This was not an ‘extraordinary circumstance’ like weather. This was the airlines’ failure to procure the necessary approvals in-advance. Pathetic.
This was a lot of fun! I was doing a connection on separate tickets from BKK to return home to BHX, having taken advantage of the recent points sale to try out their premium economy.
As l understand it, it’s basically impossible to obtain boarding passes through online check in for international flights departing India. Thai Airways had kindly printed the passes for all my flights, and interlined the bags, but the BOM transfer desk didn’t want to accept them because they said ‘Thai’ even if they included the correct PNR and document number on SK stock. The staff at the transfer desk called the SAS station supervisor who confirmed that my BP was valid then proceeded to hang up on me! After I refused to cross passport control, the staff eventually let me go through without entering India. The lounge had no idea that SAS even existed, I had no chance getting in with my KQ status.
The flight was showing as delayed by 4 hours or so, and I thought I’d have a coffee at Starbucks. About an hour before the scheduled departure time, they emailed me to say it’s been cancelled and offered to rebook me on AI/LH via FRA. The connection was pretty good, arriving some 3.5 hours later than the original routing, but I was very wary of the precise class in which I would find myself as premium economy doesn’t always map correctly between airlines.
Despite having lots of international departures from BOM, AI have no airside counter at T2, so I headed to the airport information desk. The guy there was pretty helpful but he initially insisted that SAS didn’t fly there and I must’ve been on a codeshare. When I finally convinced him that I was due to fly SK, he started ringing people around and basically got told off because I had managed to reach the airside area (!) before being informed that Scandinavian had informed TG about the cancellation. When I protested to him that I had only wanted to check my AI reservation, he finally called them and they confirmed that it was all correct.
Nothing had prepared me for what would follow. After another hour, they escorted me back to the security point next to the transfer desk. They told me that the AI staff at the desk couldn’t issue me with a BP and that the issue had to be handled by Thai(!!!) because I had flown in with them. But TG didn’t have any flights at that time so no ground staff either. Eventually someone came at about 08:00 and got my passport so that he could walk to the landside AI counter and get a printed boarding pass off them. He said he was going to be back in about 40 minutes. He took more than an hour and a half and I started to worry about missing the FRA departure at 11:20. Someone else finally came back at 10 and escorted me to the gate saying that boarding had started. Boarding hadn’t started but the lounge was about 500m away so I missed out on it again!
On the plus side, the hard product in the 789 AI premium economy was great and the cabin was less than half full, so I nabbed a pair of bulkhead seats and had a really smooth journey, even had time for a shower at the SEN lounge. Amazingly, the bags also arrived with me and without any damage. I’m also due at least €300 in 261 compensation which means that I basically flew for free (the ticket only cost 33,750 SK points plus £31 in taxes and fees), so I can’t really say that I’ve lost out.
Wow…I got tired just reading that! 😉
Lordy! 261 compensation, FTW!
Thanks for the extensive post. I enjoy reading about how people resolve these issues. Obv much easier to deal with these types of situations when you don’t have 2-3 young kids running around getting tired due to delays!
I have a cousin who lives on the other side of Birmingham and has been known to drive 5 hours to STN in the middle of the night for the ‘convenience’ of taking a direct flight because she’s terrified of the children-related consequences of connecting flights going awry. Her approach seems borderline insane to me, but I can’t really judge her as I don’t have children!
India doing Indian things.
The Civil Services of Indian bureaucracy is on par with the Germans and Italians in terms of impenetrable red tape, maddeningly tectonic pace, and persnickety perfectionism. That said, the team in Copenhagen shouldn’t have let the flight depart without every last administrative detail being in place. Now they have an embarrassing fiasco to explain, and if I were the CEO I’d be asking them who I should fire.
The most likely scenario is that someone in the Indian government said yes and then when their boss realized that there was no envelope for them the authorization was pulled.
For aviation enthusiasts → SK A330-300 jet and its right Rolls-Royce Trent 772B-60 engine in the article’s photo.