The confusion of 34 and the fog effect
A group of Sri Lankan SAG bound athletes stranded at the Delhi airport.
The Sri Lanka table tennis team may have to rush into their preliminary round matches of the 13th South Asian Games (SAG), as the flight they are travelling had to make an emergency landing in an airport elsewhere.
The Air India flight, which also carried the Sri Lanka golf squad, besides few other officials en route to Kathmandu, Nepal via Delhi, made an emergency landing in Jaipur, after poor landing visibility due to air pollution that has affected India’s capital.
The flight, scheduled to take off at 2.30 am yesterday, was delayed by almost two hours. After hovering over the Indian skies for nearly an hour, waiting for permission to land in Kolkata and Pune instead of Delhi, the flight was supposed to land at 7.00 am. But both of these airports were also affected by the similar visibility conditions and eventually the flight landed in Jaipur at around 8.00 am after running short of fuel.
The Lankan golf team will have the liberty of getting rid of the jet lag and training before their event begins, but the paddlers will now have to rush, some of them perhaps straight into action without pre-training. All these athletes are without a rest since 11.00pm Friday, and the present conditions have put them on the road for more than half of a day, for a journey that was supposed to completed in seven hours, inclusive of a transit in Delhi of slightly more than an hour.
However, upon arriving at Delhi by 12 noon, the airport authorities informed all passengers that they are capable of only accommodating 25, as the connecting flight to Kathmandu had departed one hour later than the scheduled time. Eventually squads were separated as more than half of the golf, table tennis and squash teams stayed back in Delhi for the next connecting flight schedule for Sunday morning at 7.00am. The three squads will reunite today.
Before yesterday’s sudden occurrence, the Sri Lanka athletic squad had to face a situation somewhat different due to a logistical error. The officials who had booked the accommodation for the squad of 68 athletes of men and women, had confirmed a location with 34 rooms. But only when they reached the place after a tiring journey, the squad had found out that it is a facility that could accommodate only 34 individuals.
Unwillingly, the confused officials had decided to place the women’s team there, resulting in the men’s team having to wait outside the hotel for hours, before they were given accommodation at two different places.