The temperature of partly sunny NYC recorded highest at 22ºC, with 48 per cent humidity, had left much composed bearing on them that noon as they were looking forward to a cosy air-conditioned comfort during the 16-hour homecoming flight.

But wait: there was an imp of callousness, as opposed to excellent American professionalism, awaiting them in the flight at the NYC airport.

Moments after boarding they realised that the heat inside was almost double of that outside. Asked, they were told that the AC of the aircraft was yet to start functioning.

Ten minutes passed, heat increasingly unbearable due to lack of ventilation and might have soared to 50ºC, the passengers were told that the craft was about to go to the runway for its take-off on time even without the AC, if it didn’t get corrected soon. In the air the heat would get neutralised, was the argument.

Horrified passengers got baked for another half an hour even as the AC was not repaired, but the craft started moving toward the runway for taking off indeed. Indian passengers remained hooked to their seats with stupefying tolerance initially, until it was just unbearable.

As if that was not enough, the flight officials and the crew insensitively continued to give pep talks about losses of revenues to the national carrier, if the flight got aborted due to the snag in the AC system.

That was enough for the nerves of a passenger, a senior colleague who imparts training of Quality at Service onto over 2,000 big and small Indian organisations. He was returning from an official seminar in the NYC. For him the humid-hot interior was almost killing, as he undergoes regular heart treatment.

Besides, among passengers there were heart patients and also those with other types of physical unease, who would suffer telling after-flight effects due to over 16-hour confinement without air-conditioning. There were senior citizens and children too for whom the hot flight would have spelt lasting disaster. By their overtones and tenor, AI crew thoroughly ignored the safety of passengers with medical condition, a behaviour just unpardonable in any yardstick of Quality assurance. In management theory, it is an area of negative sigma.

The colleague raised serious objection to the aircraft crew’s lackadaisical assurances, and asked them to take the aircraft back to the hanger and correct the system immediately. His snub alerted the docile passengers who rose to express sharp annoyance now.

During all this, the captain of the AI-102 flight shamelessly remained cocooned into his cabin’s comfort and never once stirred into the passenger aisles to assuage boarders’ sufferings in the oven-like confinement.

The flight AI-102 took two full hours to get its AC repaired in the hanger, and finally took off from the NYC airport behind schedule eventually to land two hours late in New Delhi.

A report by a leading newspaper confirmed the latest misdemeanor of the AI pilot. Passengers of Delhi-bound AI 410 recorded a flight uncontrollable for its pilot. It flew erratically for over 30 minutes soon after taking off from Patna airport on Sunday morning, before steadying to the relief of the passengers. The pilot flouted the flight decorum by keeping the truth about his craft’s status away from passengers among whom was the Union minister for agriculture, Radha Mohan Singh, even as the passengers reportedly panicked, but none complained.

The truth emerged from a fellow aviation safety officer’s call to the newspaper office, which proved that there are a good number of professionals in the aviation industry who are alert and responsible. They indeed wanted to alert passengers in air trips.

These are not stray cases in which Air India’s service quality of customer satisfaction was thrown out of winds. The country’s national carrier, Maharaja, which during the 60s and 70s was the brand ambassador for majestic air journeys, has turned into a bland goblin of inefficiency. This June alone it has already posted enough numbers of cases of bad AC servicing, jumping of schedules, clogged loos thereby forcing a return to the starting points thus wasting expensive fuel, broken windshields, losing baggage and never compensating, and insensitive customer torture mannerism, to be brought to task.

Multi-unionized, for Air India’s cabin crew and flight officers the customers do not seem to figure anywhere in their schemes of services either on ground or in flights. It is strange to accept that an airline can continue to accommodate so many unions years after years. If forming unions is not unlawful in India, taking passengers’ lives at risks is also as bad as trying to deny its passengers the right to life.

The Maharaja is woefully sick today. In its service to customers, compare it with the world-class airlines, Air India has discarded all sigmas of super professional quality. By the glaring callousness in AI-102, AI-410 and other five flights this month, the AI pilots and crew exhibited their pathetic professionalism. They indeed proved indifferent to compromising with passengers’ safety and physical ailments in situations which they were supposed to contain. It is time the air passengers had demanded from airliners quality service for which they pay for, and dearly. (IPA Service)