I had a nightmare the other day — this one went on and on. I was at an airport, its labyrinthine passages leading to unmarked doors. The boarding gate was nowhere in sight, and the clock went tick-tock. When I woke up gasping, it was obvious what had triggered the dream. It was fog season in Delhi, aircraft were grounded, hundreds of passengers stranded… all that revived bad memories in spades. For, not so long ago, I had an experience that merits only one word: fubar.
A week before that day, I had missed a flight from Kolkata, because the people who built the new airport terminal building there skipped the bother of putting up signage. Just getting to the check-in counter was like a steeplechase race — sprinting this way and that; stumbling over obstacles strategically placed to smash ankles; then running breathless to the counter, only to discover that the “computer has been shut down”. You are 86 seconds late for reporting, and you are bumped off. Deal with it.
So, the next week, I reached the airport two hours early. While my finger played Angry Birds, my ear was alert for boarding calls. None came, not even five minutes before the scheduled departure. The airline, the biggest white elephant in the Indian aviation sector, gave no information. An official mumbled “technical snag” and walked off in a hurry. For the next several hours, angry passengers got nothing more out of the airline staff.
When a flight was finally diverted from Bhubaneswar to pick up some of the stranded passengers, only those who shouted the loudest got seats on it. Not one bottle of water was offered during the delay, let alone the financial compensation the airline was obliged to provide under DGCA rules. An e-mail sent later to the airline headquarters got the reply that this delay was “due to circumstances beyond our control”. An unsatisfactory response, as the failure to fix a technical snag comes under incompetence, not inevitability.
Shortly after returning to Delhi, I read a report that a popular budget airline had made its passengers sit inside the plane for four hours and given them one bottle of nimbu paani to make up for it. DGCA rules flouted again. Seeing my Facebook outrage on the subject, a friend joked I should keep my cool. Why, I ask. I am grumpy, and with good reason.