Air India gets notice after three Italian passengers left IGIA without departure clearance

Three Italian nationals landed at Indira Gandhi International Airport from Amritsar at 12.50am on September 4 and left for Munich less than an hour later without mandatory departure immigration clearance.

The Union aviation ministry has issued Air India a show-cause notice over what it described as serious security and immigration-related lapses. The passengers arrived on AI 1115 and boarded a Lufthansa code-share flight that departed at 1.45am. One of the three passengers used a wheelchair.

The notice identifies two failures: Air India issued boarding passes for both the Amritsar–Delhi domestic leg and the Delhi–Munich international leg at Amritsar, and the passengers’ immigration status was not checked in Delhi before boarding. India stopped stamping international boarding cards from September 1.

Home and aviation ministry officials met at Terminal 3 on Saturday to discuss safeguards for domestic-to-international transfers. Measures under consideration include colour-coded tags or wristbands, separate arrival routes for domestic and international transfer passengers, and bilingual instructions on boarding passes.

The changes would apply to Air India’s hub-and-spoke operations, which have begun at Amritsar, Varanasi and Ahmedabad, with Delhi among the airline’s key transit hubs.