I am coming back from an impromptu holiday in Malaysia, a 4-hour flight to Kolkata. I decide to take a nap before the flight lands. I wake up 4.5-hours later to the announcement that our flight is about to land in Dhaka, Bangladesh. A weird tingling in my stomach and a blanked out mind, all I can think about is “what the hell is happening!?”. The first thing I do is check my ticket, things check out there, it says “Destination: CCU”. Next, I ask my friends randomly sprinkled in the flight by AirAsia, and this is when I get to know what has actually happened.
So it goes like this, the AirAsia flight hovered over Kolkata for half an hour as the weather underneath was not conducive for a landing. The visibility was down to less than 50m and from what chitter-chatter that I have heard, the condition of the flight wasn’t too good either. This is when the pilots decided that we need to land at a nearby airport. In general circumstances, the plane would have landed at some other airport within India itself. But for some reason, the pilot decided to divert the flight to Bangladesh. Had they flown for another 15-20 minutes (150 km further than Dhaka), they could easily reach Bhubaneshwar which also has an international airport. Maybe the other flights were diverted there which filled up their capacity, but it was final, we were going to Bangladesh. Ideally, when I would have thought of traveling abroad, Dhaka wouldn’t have featured in my list of the probables for the time being.
I thought that it would a short layover, maybe a couple of hours after which we will leave for Kolkata as it was already 3 AM by the time we landed in Bangladesh. But NO, whether due to airport constraints or Airline constraints, our flight was rescheduled for departure 12 hours later i.e. 4 PM. we had 12 hours in Bangladesh which were soon to be converted into a 16-hour layover very soon. I will share the rest of the story in 2 other parts of the Bangladesh Series about how my 16 hours went by in Bangladesh and what happened once we landed over there (things didn’t look rosy, to say the least).
