Almost one emergency a day, the worrisome pattern on Indian skies
“Airlines everywhere face technical snags, flight delays etc., and India is not immune. It is just that since the Ahmedabad incident, there is increased focus on such incidents.”
This is a running narrative being plugged by India’s airlines, even as incidents of emergency landing, flight diversions and other snags come out virtually on a daily basis. But is that all there is to it?
According to Union Minister of State for Civil Aviation Murlidhar Mohol, there have been 183 untoward incidents by Indian airlines reported till July this year.
That is almost one emergency incident a day!
According to figures shared by the minister in Parliament, over 2,000 technical defects were reported by civil flights in the country in just the last four years or so.
Nearly half of the incidents reported this year are from the Tata-run Air India. Matters reached a head this Sunday, when an Air India flight carrying as many as five parliamentarians from Thiruvananthapuram to Delhi had to be diverted to Chennai mid-flight after the crew suspected the radars to malfunction. However, the diversion turned into another scary situation after the first landing had to be aborted due to the presence of another aircraft on the tarmac.
Congress general secretary K.C.Venugopal, who was on board, billed the journey “frighteningly close to tragedy.” He has called for a DGCA investigation into the incident.
Worryingly, the incident is no outlier. This, despite air travel in India in general, and aboard Air India in particular, coming under the lens since the June 12 disaster of Air India’s Dreamliner from Ahmedabad to London, killing some 260 people — all but one of the 242 on board and some 29 on the ground.
Every other day, an incident report pops up of an Air India flight facing a malfunction of some kind, or some trouble while landing or taking off. Before the incident this week, amidst the many reported cases was a Kochi-Mumbai flight which landed in pouring rain and skidded off the runway last month, damaging one of its engines (and bringing the busy Mumbai airport to a standstill for hours). A couple of days before that, a Kozhikode-Doha flight by Air India Express, AI’s low-cost subsidiary, diverted due to a, yes, you guessed it right, a technical snag.
The irony in the entire pattern of recurring incidents is that Air India had an abysmal reputation while being a government-run airline in the 2000s and 2010s, which was expected to dramatically improve after the Tatas, with their reputation for bringing a touch of excellence into everything they do, took over in early 2022.
The cheerleaders couldn’t have been more wrong. Tata execs, many with no experience of how aviation works, came in, and if industry veterans are to be believed, with an imperious ‘saviour attitude’ with the default approach that all AI staffers were inept and had to be wrung through the wringer (or preferably, take voluntary retirement and disappear). They also decided on internal uniformisation of perks as well as the shutdown of the award-winning and profitable Tata airline Vistara, in favour of Air India brand.
The result? At least two rounds of public strikes by employees, as well as increasing reports of customer dissatisfaction, technical snags and in-flight horror stories becoming the norm.
To give them due, the Tata management did show intent, pumping in thousands of crores on buying new airplanes and retrofitting existing ones (a process that is painfully delayed presently). putting in motion a five-year transformation process called vihaan.ai.
But nearly three years into the supposed ‘transformation’, the only visible change seems to be a spanking new corporate HQ in Gurugram, and a new livery design as well as uniforms designed by Manish Malhotra.
“The honeymoon period is over. People are now expecting (more),” said an aviation expert who formerly ran the nation’s biggest airport.
Meanwhile, technical issues and customer complaints continue streaming in. Adding to passenger woes have also been many flight cancellations and deviations, as planes have been pulled in for safety audits and maintenance. Air India announced on Sunday that it was discontinuing its Washington-Delhi direct flight due to a shortage of planes.
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