Air India flight passengers stay at makeshift accommodation in a nearby school after it had to land at the Sokol Airport in Magadan, Russia.
| Photo Credit: PTI
The 216 people on board the Air India flight from Delhi to San Francisco that made an emergency landing on Tuesday are stranded in Russia’s remote town of Magadan, a key transit point of the infamous Gulag which was a major instrument of political repression during the Stalin era in the erstwhile Soviet Union.
Flight AI173 was diverted to Magadan on Tuesday due to an engine glitch in the Boeing 777-200 LR aircraft.
Air India on Wednesday sent a ferry flight – carrying food and other essentials – to Magadan to fly the passengers bound for San Francisco, who are currently stranded.
Magadan is located on the shores of the Sea of Okhotsk in northeastern Russia and falls under the administrative centre of Magadan Oblast. The port town is about 10,167 km from Moscow. It takes around 7 hours and 37 minutes to reach Magadan from Moscow by air.
Citing Minister of Transport of the Magadan Region Aleksey Siorpas, Sputnik reported that all the passengers were accommodated at a school near the airport and women with children or pregnant women were accommodated in the dormitory of a medical college in the city.
All of them were provided with meals, and the situation was explained to them, Mr. Siorpas said, adding, however, that the passengers could not leave the premises of their places of accommodation as Russian border guards were with them.
Transport prosecutor of Magadan Region Vitaly Druppov told Sputnik news agency that all the passengers have been provided with warm blankets and meals, adding that the regional and airport authorities have done everything that depended on them.
The climate in Magadan is harsh, with short summers, which accounts for the period of “white nights” that persist throughout the summer: a time when the sun barely sets below the horizon.
Given the infrastructural limitations around the remote airport, “we can confirm that all passengers were eventually moved to a makeshift accommodation, after making sincere attempts to accommodate passengers in hotels locally with the help of local government authorities,” Air India said.
It noted that the airline does not have a staff based in the remote town of Magadan or in Russia, and the support that is being provided to the passengers “is the best possible in this unusual circumstance.”
This support is being provided through the airline’s round-the-clock liaison with the Consulate General of India in Vladivostok, India’s Ministry of External Affairs, local ground handlers, and the “Russian authorities”, it said.
Air India said it engaged with the local authorities at Magadan Airport that extended all cooperation and support upon the flight’s arrival there.
Russia’s air transport regulator said there were four infants on the flight.
Magadan was founded in 1929 as a base for transferring Gulag prisoners who arrived by sea to work at the Kolyma gold mine. Under Stalin’s rule, the Kolyma Gulag became the most notorious region for the Gulag labour camps. Tens of thousands or more people died en route to the area or in the Kolyma’s gold mining, road building, lumbering, and construction camps between 1932 and 1954.
