DC Edit | Airline Chaos Was Avoidable

The aviation chaos that has been affecting passengers of India’s largest carrier IndiGo could have been largely avoided if the airline had done any planning on meeting eventualities arising from the regulations that took effect last month, a year and a half after they were proposed.

True, there are annual disruptions to air travel caused by winter weather in the north and the northeast monsoon season in the south. But the current delays and across-the-board cancellations of around 1,000 flights over four days from among the carrier’s 1,500 daily flights are owed more to IndiGo’s “prolonged and unorthodox lean manpower strategy across all departments, particularly inflight operations” as its body of pilots puts it.

The airline has been hauled up by the DGCA for the unprecedented levels of confusion regarding scheduled arrivals and departures with the elderly and mothers with young children sometimes having to spend whole nights at terminals before their flights took off. The delays, anxieties and stress from infrastructure that is not built to withstand such mass delays and cancellations have inflicted a toll on the average Indian air passenger.

The new FDTL regulations are empathetic to pilots who have been suffering untold miseries for years in the airlines’ policies regarding a pilot wage freeze even as hiring has been put on hold despite the need for more pilots to fly in the new regulated environment. The airline cannot continue to be an insensitive employer with such practices as non-poaching agreements with competitors, etc, while executive staff are rewarded.

The duopoly of Air India and IndiGo, operating over 90 per cent of domestic flights, is not to be blamed for this disarray caused by a behemoth of the growing Indian aviation industry. The public may have suffered without a voice for decades when a monopoly existed, but in these more enlightened times in which social media offers a convenient platform to air grievances, it is the way in which airlines operate that comes into sharp focus.

Airlines are not a mere service industry to be equated with a blasé bureaucracy impervious to customer needs and comforts. There are social obligations to consider when serving millions of Indians and others who have a right to expect a certain level of efficiency in public service aviation. The DGCA must crack the whip to get the airline to get its act together or face exemplary fines.