The airline industry seems to have strange ways.Its practices are even stanger, sometimes bordering on the bizarre. British Mediterranean Airlines is operating a flight from Heathrow to Cardiff without a single passenger . It flies an empty Airbus round the trip of 240 miles emitting ten tons of carbondioxide into the atmosphere.This is the equivalent of carbon gases emission per day of a town of 2000 inhabitants. The ostensible reason given out by the airline officials is that they are forced to resort to this in order to retain their landing slot at Heathrow which once lost can be got back only at a huge cost. The going rate now is around ten million pounds. All the grand talk about strict measures taken by the airline industry in the direction of cutting down GH gas emissions is just talk when it comes aginst hard cash.
Now we come to the bizarre part. A British Airways flight from Delhi to London strapped the corpse of a passenger who died in midflight to a seat in the first class right next to another passenger. The passenger later said he had a harrowing time sitting next to a dead body that slippd down every now and then and had to be hoisted back and strapped again by the cabin crew. All through the flight the passenger was in mortal fear that the body might decompose. When later he complained to the officials he was advised that he would recover from the experience. He is lucky that they had not pointed out how thankful he should be for getting such a quite and least troublesome copassenger next to him !
