Vande Bharat Mission: 168 evacuees from US land in Hyderabad

Over 160 Indian citizens from Chicago in the U.S arrived in Hyderabad on Sunday on board an Air India flight, the ninth such service to reach the city since the beginning of the Vande Bharat Mission to repatriate people from the country stranded due to coronavirus lockdown.

The AI 126 flight arrived via Delhi at the international airport here at 4.45 AM, airport sources said. The passengers were serviced through the fully sanitised international arrivals of the main passenger terminal of the airport, they said. This is the ninth Vande Bharat evacuation flight to land in the city.

To facilitate the arriving passengers and aircraft crew, the airport has kept the international arrivals and the entire stretch right from aerobridge to arrivals ramp fully sanitised and fumigated.

The airport also enforced social distancing among passengers right from the aero-bridge to across the terminal, the sources added.

All arriving passengers and aircraft crew were brought out from the aircraft in a batch of 20-25 people each and screened using the thermal cameras under supervision of the airport health officials as per the directives of the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare prior to immigration formalities.

The sources also said the airport handled the departure of a repatriation flight from Hyderabad to Delhi carrying 68 passengers bound for foreign countries. Air India AI 1840 departed at 06.41 AM. As per the flight itinerary, from Delhi, these passengers were supposed to be airlifted to various destinations in the UK and the US.

(Representative image: Credits: Twitter/@CGI_Atlanta)