Calcutta, Jan. 21: The 130 passengers of a Singapore-bound Air India Express flight were kept waiting for over 12 hours today on the plane and at Calcutta airport, with its “overflowing” terminal lounge toilets and “non-existent” drinking water facilities, before the flight was cancelled.

The Boeing 747-800 was scheduled to take off at 3.25am but developed a snag. By the time it had been rectified, the pilot’s flying time was over.

As Air India Express, the low-cost wing of government carrier Air India, does not have an engineering base at the airport, equipment and technicians had to be flown in from Mumbai, an Air India official said tonight. He said the flight would take off at 3.25am on Sunday.

“Once the repair was over by 1pm, the flight duty time limitation period of the pilots was over and so the plane couldn’t take off,” an airline spokesperson said.

The passengers alleged they had been kept on board for two-and-a-half hours and that even after disembarking, the airline’s staff did not provide them with proper information on when the flight might take off.

“We had boarded the aircraft at 2.30am. Initially, the pilot announced that the flight was delayed because of bad weather in Singapore but later, he said there was a technical problem,” said Santanu Sanyal, a Calcutta-based general surgeon who was going to Singapore on a vacation with four other doctors.

He said the passengers were asked to disembark around 5am and brought to the transit lounge of the airport’s international terminal building.

Sanyal said airline staff initially told passengers that an “update” would be given around 6.30am. “However, no airline staff could be seen at that time. We went to their office at the airport and were told the flight would take off at 10am,” he said.

“Then, the flight time was rescheduled to 2pm. Around 2pm, an Air India Express employee told us the flight would take off at 8pm. After some time, the airline formally told us the flight had been cancelled for the day,” Sanyal said.

S. Bose, who was travelling with Sanyal, alleged the toilets were ill-kept. “The toilets in the transit lounge were overflowing as there was no cleaning staff. No drinking water facilities were available,” he said.

The doctors have cancelled their tickets and taken a refund.

The airline spokesperson said that since Air India Express operated its Airbus aircraft from Calcutta, “there is no maintenance base for the Boeing aircraft”.

“So we had to fly in the engineers and equipment from Mumbai,” he said. “We were hoping that the repair work would be over soon and so, the passengers couldn’t be given the exact time of departure initially.”

The spokesperson said that passengers who were not from Calcutta had been provided with hotel accommodation.