The Great Indian Aviation Robbery

The breakdown was not sudden, though it felt that way to those of us trapped in the glass-and-steel belly of Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport that day.

- Anand Neelakantan

It was a Tuesday that masqueraded as a descent into a Kafkaesque purgatory. I arrived for a scheduled flight to Calicut, and walked into a scene that resembled a refugee crisis hosted in a luxury shopping mall.For seven interminable hours, the vaunted Terminal 2 ceased to be an airport and became a holding pen for the hopeless. But the most striking feature of this dystopian tableau was not the suffering of the passengers; it was the absolute, spectral absence of the airline staff. The ground personnel of the country’s largest carrier had simply vanished.

What happened that day in Mumbai, and what is happening across Indian skies, is not an accident. It is the inevitable combustion of a sector fuelled by policy hypocrisy, monopolistic arrogance, and a tax regime that seems designed to destroy the very industry it claims to nurture.

Let us dissect the anatomy of this failure. The immediate trigger was the implementation of new Flight Duty Time Limitations (FDTL). The logic is unassailable: tired pilots kill people. However, in the chaotic ecosystem of Indian aviation, logic is the first casualty. The airlines, having run their rosters on the razor’s edge of human endurance for years, threw up their hands. They did not have the pilots to support a humane roster.

And how did the government respond? Did it enforce the safety norms with an iron hand? No. It bent backward. It deferred deadlines. It allowed the chaos to fester, caught between the desire for safety and the pressure of corporate lobbying. We want First World safety records while operating with Third World resource planning. The result is a system where the pilot flying you is overworked, the roster is a fiction, and the schedule is a lie.