As I turned back
to understand the reason for some commotion at the airport, I found a few flyers
confronting the two ground duty staff, manning the boarding gate. The display screen at the gate continued to
show the same ETD for a Mumbai – Bangalore flight, though it was well past that
time and there were no signs of the incoming aircraft yet. I too was supposed to take the same flight
and could see many flyers getting impatient as it was already 2 hours past the
scheduled boarding time. And that meant the flight would reach Bangalore well past
midnight.
While the
phenomenon of delayed flights was nothing new, it was the lack of correct
information that caused more anxiety to the flyers. I have been witness to the
chaos at Mumbai airport, on those heavy rainy days of September, when not only
the flights were abnormally delayed but were also cancelled. On those
occasions, despite all the inconvenience, the flyers never took their ire on
the ground staff. But here was a situation where they did not see any weather
related constraints – neither in Mumbai nor in Udaipur, where the flight was supposed
to have originated from.
It was indeed
sheer apathy on part of the airline. On their part, they said that the aircraft
had reached Mumbai and was hovering around the city for almost one hour,
waiting for clearance to land. And then something stuck me. I had read a newspaper
report a couple of days ago that the Mumbai airport had set a new record of air
traffic – managing 980 flights in a span of 24 hours. Improving efficiency is
good but not at the risk of paying a heavy price. This is not a typical corporate
world where if you don’t meet your stretch goal, it just costs you a certain
variable pay component or at the most an elevation. Here the precious lives are
at risk and hence these records are required to be seen from a different
perspective. Passenger safety is the key and there cannot be a trade-off on
that.
Coming back to
the incident, I have faced a situation when I boarded the flight but the
pushback happened after 2 hours. The pilot had informed well in advance that we
were in the queue behind other 37 aircrafts. There was a very heavy fog earlier
in the morning and the airport was shut down for about 2 hours. The cascading delay,
therefore, was explainable and the flyers could appreciate the situation. In
the current scenario, however, there were no explicable reasons. The weather
was perfect across the country all through the day. And hence the backlash.
The challenge of
celebrating record breaking numbers is that they become the new baseline. The
air traffic control is then expected to handle those numbers in the normal
circumstances. The new schedules are drawn without considering breathing
spaces. The crunched schedules are expected to work with precision – barring the
weather induced disruptions as exceptions.
The job of an
air traffic controller is a high pressure job. My worry is that when I fly next
time, I am not sure if my aircraft is guided by an overworked controller. Or when
my flight gets delayed next time, I am not sure if it is a genuine delay or a
mess up of the controllers’ duty roster that had not considered a lower than
full attendance. Or, if my pilot has just been asked to do a short
merry-go-round the city just because an overworked controller had to take an
urgent, long-suppressed bio-break.
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