Our Air India flight from Jaipur to Mumbai Saturday that was scheduled to take a bit under two hours was four hours late. The good news is that we got to Mumbai at a time when the airline business here seems in danger of imploding. The Air India flights are merely running very late, as compared to the Kingfisher flights, which go as far as London and Bangkok (our route in) are being cancelled by the dozens and Jet Air, which flies from as far as Newark, is reporting massive losses.
What’s going on here?
The local press says all are being eaten alive by rising fuel costs. Air India hasn’t paid its flight crews for October yet, so they’ve understandably been taking a lot of days off recently. Kingfisher is behind on its payrolls, but apparently in arrears in other bills as well to a point where there are fears some of its planes may be seized by creditors. The government’s looking for a new industrial policy to make things right. It used to merely subsidize Air India as the monopoly carrier. Now there’s a possibility it may subsidize its competitors as well. As with all financial stories, the situation is a bit opaque, particularly to a visitor. But it appears that government-affiliated banks have loaned all the carriers a lot of money and there’s some interest in a fix that will keep these loans alive.
Another option would be to permit foreign firms to invest in local airlines, an issue that proved thorny in the U.S. As well and slowed the launch of Virgin America. Whether anyone anywhere has an interest in making such investments isn’t clear.
But our story is a personal one that may reflect some perspective on policy. We arrived at the airport (like government airports in India generally, it is composed of two terminals – one domestic and one international – flanking a runway) to see that our flight, one of two still scheduled for the day, would take off at 5 p.m. rather than 1:30. My trust that Air India would use the same e-commerce system that I used to buy the ticket to alert me of such a change was misguided. There were about a dozen passengers in the terminal and many, many more security personnel. And while the facility does get points for working plumbing, the absence of anywhere to buy food or drink was a bother.
After an hour, we were permitted to check in and assigned seats and told to stick around because lunch would be served around 2 and, sure enough, they loaded us into a creaky and oppressively hot Air India bus around that time and drove us to a luxury hotel where we enjoyed the lunch buffet followed by an hour of sitting in the lobby, which was a bit more comfortable than the airport, before being loaded back on the bus and returned to the airport just in time to learn that the incoming plane, now scheduled for 4:55 would be late. It was.
But it did get there and we were ready for takeoff by about 5:30 with a nearly full plane (dozens of people apparently had the sense to check the flight status before showing up at the airport and thus missed both the waiting and the free lunch). We were, of course, served a snack on the plane for a fairly calm flight marked only by the pilot being ordered to reshoot his approach to Mumbai because there was something on the runway.
It was dark. We were tired and somewhat stressed, but happy to have actually reached our destination. Whether this is any way to run an airline – or aviation system – is something we’ll leave the Indians to debate.
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