Honeymoon fight: Man walks off plane, leaves wife behind

A Lucknow-based couple went to Goa on honeymoon but on the flight back home, they had such a fight that the husband simply walked off the flight at a stopover. Unbelievable as it may sound, this is what was witnessed on IndiGo's Goa-Kolkata-Patna-Lucknow-Delhi flight (6E 633) on Thursday, reports The Times of India.
The couple were travelling in a group of six to Lucknow when they reportedly had a fight.
The husband walked off the aircraft when it was at Patna, TOI said quoting R S Lahotia, airport director.
"Airlines are supposed to check boarding cards of passengers who get down at stopovers. Only the airline can say whether it checked this man's boarding card and how he got off. This is a lapse," Lahotia said on Friday.
By alighting at Patna, the man exposed serious chinks in aviation security as passengers are not allowed to get off at a stopover and elaborate mechanisms exist to avoid such a situation.
Airlines are supposed to check boarding passes of passengers alighting at stopovers. A senior Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) official blamed the airline solely for not being able to check a Lucknow-bound passenger getting off the plane at Patna.
IndiGo did not comment for this story.
When the 30-minute stopover at Patna was getting over, the airline did a headcount to prepare for the flight to Lucknow.
The wife also got hysterical that her husband was missing from the flight. A hunt was launched for the "missing husband". Attempts to reach him on his cell also proved futile. While Patna airport and CISF officials said only the airline will be able to say if the husband was found.
The flight is learnt to have taken off for Lucknow after a delay without the husband.
Aviation insiders find this case "strange" as airlines have tackled with the issue of people not flying for longer distance than they have paid.
So they have to, for instance, ensure that on a Delhi-Mumbai-Kochi flight all Mumbai-bound passengers alight there and not try to fly on to Kochi. This was a rare instance where a person paid to travel longer distance but got down mid-way.