Lack of additional Baggage Screening Machine is a huge setback to the Coimbatore City International Airport, as presently there is only one screener owned by the Airport Customs department at the arrival in addition to the hand baggage screener which goes faulty often.
With the airport starting service to the third country, Sri Lanka recently, if the only available machine is faulty, passengers would have go through a strenuous process by collecting their checked-in bags and again loading them in the small hand baggage screening machine, which would consume a lot of time, since the machine is relatively smaller.
There are also chances that some of the bags may not be screened and with only less than ten Customs officials at the time of arrival, it would be seemingly impossible to manually check all the bags resulting in malpractices.
Sources claim that during such ordeals, many bags go unchecked as manual checking could not be done resulting in unwanted arguments between the officials and the passengers.
In a recent incident, the defective baggage scanner was not functioning properly, forcing the passengers to waste unwanted time here on Friday.
According to a complaint letter filed by a passenger of the Silk Air Flight number MI 456, the passengers who arrived by the flight from Singapore on the day were made to wait for long hours since the Baggage Screening Machine at the arrival was not functioning.
In his complaint filed to the Commissioner of Central GST Commissionerate and jointly attached to the Director of Coimbatore International Airport, the passenger K.S. Balamurugan, Managing Trustee of Sodalamuthu Charitable Trust, has said that because of this malfunction, the passengers were asked to collect their bags once again and stand in another queue.
The passengers had to load their checked-in bags once again into the hand baggage scanner at the arrival hall. Since the machine was smaller than the regular baggage screening machine, passengers who had traveled all the way from Singapore were once again made to wait until every bag was checked.
"The arriving passengers were put to unnecessary inconvenience and hardship for no fault of theirs. Especially, elderly passengers and those with infants were finding it difficult to undergo this ordeal after a long flight journey,” Balamurugan said.
Claiming that the image of the City Airport and its Custom’s department had taken a big beating because of the incident, Balamurugan had also alleged that proper checking of the machine would have avoided such unnecessary inconvenience to the passengers.
He had further requested the Airport Customs department to avoid such incidents in the future and provide hassle free trips to the passengers.
Meanwhile, according to a senior official from the airport, the machine was immediately checked and was ready for the next flight.