New Delhi, May 26 (IANS) Air India may have failed to fly its passengers in recent days due to the ongoing pilots' strike, but the carrier came to the rescue of passengers of a 30-hour delayed British Airways (BA) flight stranded at the Indira Gandhi International (IGI) airport here and flew them to their destination in Britain.

We have managed to help some of the stranded passengers of the BA flight which was scheduled to operate between Delhi-London yesterday (Friday) but never took off due to some technical reasons, a senior Air India official on the operations arm of the airline told IANS.

According to airport sources, the BA flight scheduled to fly out of New Delhi Friday morning had developed some technical snags. The flight was not operated after a section of the passengers protested.

Next day (Saturday) the technical problem could not be solved and the passengers had to be transferred to other airlines, including us.

The beleaguered airline is currently operating on a contingency plan whereby it is clubbing its flights to destinations in Europe and the US.

It will start a truncated interim schedule for June. The interim schedule will effectively drop seven international destinations from its regular routine like Hong Kong, Osaka, Seoul and Toronto. Accordingly, between June 2 and 30, only 38 services will operate instead of the regular 45.

The airlines' strike entered it 19-day Saturday, and its losses mounted to Rs.290 crore.