Austrian politician Klemens von Metternich’s famous quote—“When France sneezes, the rest of Europe catches a cold”—perhaps applies to Delhi and other Indian airports too. The Indira Gandhi International Airport has recently been in the throes of chaos, thanks to dense fog causing extensive flight disruptions, and its ripple effect has been felt across the country. Hundreds of flights have been delayed or cancelled over the weekend, all of it snowballing into yet another national crisis of sorts. Social media sites have been overflowing with horror stories of passengers—travellers eating their meals on the tarmac at Mumbai airport, a passenger assaulting a pilot over a 10-hour delay, and hundreds left to fend for themselves at overcrowded airports with little or no clarity on rescheduled timings.
All of it has further dented the image of country’s aviation sector, which has struggled after the pandemic to control skyrocketing fares in the face of dipping service standards. Things reached a boiling point when senior leader Shashi Tharoor took to X.com to flag the issue and pulled no punches; soon after, civil aviation minister Jyotiradiya Scindia returned with a point-by-point rebuttal. Despite the minister’s assertion that India’s aviation sector has vastly improved in the last 10 years, there is no denying that infrastructure inadequacy has again triggered an annual winter horror. Of the Delhi airport’s four runways, two are compliant with Category III landing systems that can operate in low-visibility conditions. Of the two, one has been shut for re-carpeting, while the other was affected by work on the Dwarka expressway. For an airport that handled more than 65 million passengers in 2022-23, more technical efficiency is the call of the day.
While nothing can be done about the poor weather, there is a great deal that can be achieved through better communication on the part of the private airlines as well as the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA). While there has been an outpouring of travellers’ woes, airlines have shown very little empathy to address the situation. Scindia’s announcement of setting up war rooms at six metros to take care of passenger grievance is welcome, but he must also see to it that the DGCA drops its lethargy. It is being seen as an agency that is slow to crack the whip, and that is not helping the aviation sector at all.