New Delhi: India’s Ministry of Civil Aviation has demanded answers from Air India after three Italian nationals managed to bypass mandatory departure immigration checks at Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi before boarding a flight to Munich. In a stern show-cause notice issued on September 12, the civil aviation ministry confronted the national carrier with nine detailed queries, questioning how several security protocols and safeguards broke down across successive stages of the airline’s hub-and-spoke transit operation.
The security lapse occurred in the early hours of September 4, when the three passengers landed in Delhi at 12:50 a.m. aboard Air India flight AI1115 from Amritsar. Under standard operating procedures approved for hub-and-spoke transit, travellers arriving on domestic legs hold boarding passes stamped with a domestic designation and must exit through a designated gate in the terminal’s immigration hall. There, they are required to complete full departure clearance before moving on to their international departure gates.
Instead of undergoing the mandatory border checks, the passengers were allegedly escorted directly into the international-to-international transfer area. From this sterile transit corridor, they made their way straight to the departure gates and boarded Lufthansa flight LH763 to Munich, which departed at 1:45 a.m., leaving Indian airspace without any record of formal departure clearance.
The ministry’s notice probes every phase of the itinerary, starting with ground operations at the origin airport in Amritsar. Regulators have questioned why onward boarding passes for the Lufthansa departure were issued at a regional spoke airport, an action contrary to established operational guidelines. The inquiry also places ground handling under intense scrutiny, seeking accountability regarding the specific personnel from Air India and handling agency AISATS who escorted the passengers through the wrong routing channel instead of enforcing strict passenger segregation.
Supervisory oversight within the carrier has drawn sharp criticism as well. Under aviation safety protocols, airlines running hub operations are mandated to maintain round-the-clock airline nodal officers and support teams specifically tasked with ensuring departing travellers do not slip past border control. The ministry has asked why this supervision failed, why passenger reconciliation between domestic and international manifests was delayed, and whether passenger information and manifest records were accurately transmitted to immigration authorities.
A primary concern highlighted in the notice is that the entire lapse was only identified well after the aircraft was airborne, discovered through subsequent manual reconciliation rather than caught by existing real-time safeguards. Air India has been granted seven days to provide comprehensive documentation and an explanation of the operational failure. The aviation ministry cautioned that failure to respond within the stipulated timeline will lead authorities to proceed on existing records and initiate appropriate regulatory and administrative penalties.
