Air India put on notice after three Italians leave Delhi without immigration

The Ministry of Civil Aviation has issued a show-cause notice to Air India after three Italian nationals flew from Amritsar to Delhi and then to Munich without completing India's departure immigration check.

The notice is dated 12 September. The flights were on the night of 3-4 September. The three passengers arrived at Indira Gandhi International Airport at 00:50 on Air India flight AI-1115 from Amritsar and left at 01:45 on Lufthansa LH-763. The ministry called the gap a "serious security and immigration-related lapse" in Air India's hub-and-spoke operation.

The passengers have been named in Indian reporting as Surjit Singh, Balwinder Kaur and Gurdev Singh. One of them was in a wheelchair. They held Italian nationality. Boarding passes for both the domestic Amritsar-Delhi leg and the international Delhi-Munich leg were issued in Amritsar.

Where the SOP broke

India recently opened hub-and-spoke transfers at Varanasi, Amritsar and Ahmedabad so that Air India could connect domestic arrivals to international departures without sending every passenger through the full terminal flow. The approved standard operating procedure requires strict segregation of domestic-to-international travellers and assigns the airline clear duties at both ends.

The first break, officials told the Times of India, was the issue of through boarding cards in Amritsar to foreign nationals on a domestic-to-international itinerary. The second break was in Delhi. Staff did not check, electronically or by hand, whether those cards had been stamped or cleared by immigration. A possible contributing change is that India stopped stamping immigration on boarding cards from 1 September.

Instead of being sent to departure immigration, the three were taken from Gate 39 into the international-to-international transfer area, according to Gulf News. From there they reached the international departure zone and boarded the Lufthansa aircraft.

The lapse was found after they had already left. The Ministry of Home Affairs called a stakeholder meeting at Terminal 3. Additional secretary Puneet Kansal of the aviation ministry chaired a session that lasted more than five hours. Air India has seven days from the notice to explain itself. Comments from the airline had not been published when the first reports appeared on 14 September.

Why a 55-minute connection is a security file

Fifty-five minutes is a legal connection on a codeshare. It is also a window in which three foreign passport holders moved from a domestic gate to an international aircraft without the exit stamp that every other departing foreigner is supposed to collect. The ministry's language treats that as a security event, not a customer-service failure.

Hub-and-spoke only works if the airline's ground staff and the airport's immigration filters agree on who is a transfer passenger and who is leaving the country. Domestic-to-international is not the same as international-to-international. The three Italians were the first category and were handled as the second.

Stopping boarding-card stamps from 1 September removed a visible cue. It did not remove the underlying legal duty. If staff now rely on a stamp that no longer exists, every D-I transfer at IGI is running on a weaker check than the SOP assumed.

What the notice can do

A show-cause is not a fine and not a grounding. It forces Air India to put a written account on file. The Directorate General of Civil Aviation can follow with penalties, a change to the hub-and-spoke approval, or both. Home ministry interest means the file will not stay inside aviation.

The three passengers are in Germany. The question for the next week is whether Air India's reply names a software miss, a human miss, or a gap in the new stamp-free process. The ministry has already named the flights, the times and the SOP that was supposed to stop this happening.