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Is Air India Passing the Buck?

In George’s Point of View

Russi Mody who ran Air India in 1993 resigned because his grand plan for Air India was strangled by red-tape and government intervention. Mody’s famous last words condemn Air India’s “lack of talent and the complete absence of an incentive and accountability culture. There is no punishment, no reward, no participation and the horse and the donkey are treated alike.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

It looks like the Air India tradition is continuing. Air India has booted out Chairman and Managing Director Arvind Jadhav, and booted in Rohit Nandan. Jadhav had only been there since May 2009, his tenure lasting a year before and after the May 22 Air India Express Flight 812 crash in Mangalore, where the plane touched down 300 feet past the touch down zone on a “tabletop” runway which demands a very precise approach. One might say that Air India Express Flight 812 did not make a precise approach.

Hopefully Rohit Nandan will be able to assist Air India to straighten out its troubled finances, with debt over 42570 crore, and losses of 22,000 crore. They say he’s there for damage control, because the damage has already happened.

Air India paid its April and May wages on June 28 and incentive pay has yet to be paid. The Indian government is infusing money into the airline (currently a 5,000 bailout with more to come.)

Nandan is hoping to turn around the airline and make it profitable, with the government’s help.

We’re skeptical, but we hope he can fix things, because we’re concerned for the victims of the Mangalore crash back in May 22 2010.

The Kerala High Court upheld the rules of the Montreal Convention, and directed Air India to pay 75 lakhs as compensation to the families victim of that crash, but the airline has not abided by the directive and is considering a fight in court.

I know that no one has gotten anything yet; but families should know that in most cases the value of the case is much higher than 75 lakhs, pursuant to Tier II of the Montreal Treaty. I’m not a lawyer but I know how it works from experience over the many years I have been working with wrongful death cases, and based on the experience my aviation experts have graciously passed on to me. If you can prove provable damages then Tier II (referred to in Article 21(2) of the Montreal Convention) Air India Express is liable to families/passengers for all personal injury or wrongful death damages exceeding 100,000 Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), unless the carrier(s) can prove that the injuries or deaths were not due to the negligence or other wrongful act or omission of the carrier or it servants or agents. OR the injuries or deaths were solely due to the negligence or other wrongful act or omission of a third party.

My guess is that the carrier will never prove this and the burden of proof is on them. If I am correct, and know the experts who have taught me, are correct…

Air India Express is liable to the victims families for all damages under the applicable law, including but not limited to, pain & suffering of your loved one prior to death.

They are liable for pain and suffering of the survivors and heirs of the victims.

Air India Express is liable for the loss of support, i.e., money.

Air India is liable for the loss and enjoyment of life of the victim.

I could go on but I will stop here, and caution the families to please be very careful. Don’t give up all that you may have coming in return for even a payment of the 75 lakhs that at this point, the company is appealing. If they actually get around to offering it to you, to get it, it means you have to give up all your rights to future claims.

This is not a cold corporate issue. These are families involved, the struggling families of the 158 people killed aboard the death-bound Mangalore Air India Express Flight. Families struggling now to make ends meet, and dealing with the loss of fathers, mothers, children. Let us hope these once broken homes are not twice made victims by being taken advantage of, instead of getting the support that anyone with a heart knows they deserve.

Air India’s lack of talent lost a whole lot more than money. It lost 158 lives, and seems to be doing its best to destroy the families, first with the crash, now by neglect, and maybe soon by legislation. The families are now floundering for a year in grief, wrestling to keep their head above water, while corporate heads are pinching pennies, playing corporate musical chairs, and playing a blame game over disastrous policies. They deserve better.

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    Fatigue or not-fatigue? That is the Question


    After the crash of the Colgan Air flight in Buffalo, the new fatigue regulations hold the promise of increased safety for commercial pilots now that they are scheduled travel time plus 8 hours of sleep time (ten hours) sandwiched between flights.

    But the fatigue regulations do not apply to cargo pilots.

    The discrepancy has to do with the expense of insurance covering the lives of hundreds of passengers vs. the lives of a couple of pilots on a cargo flight; but the NTSB isn’t buying it. Cargo pilots, many of whom fly at night, are just as likely to get fatigued as commercial pilots.

    Should cargo pilots, who fly largely at night and who don’t have to maintain the same kind of scheduling as commercial passenger airlines be entitled to the same kind of fatigue protections?

    What do you think?

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  • Erosion of Safety or Common Sense?

    Last year I was in a plane seat for about 230k miles. The year before, at least that many or more. I believe in being safe up there. Personally, I have no personal problem with body scans. I liked that movie, Modern Problems. I might not mind glowing in the dark. Maybe it would save on electricity.

    Let’s think for a minute about the irony of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) mandate, the government agency whose job it is to protect the nation’s transportation systems to ensure freedom of movement for people and commerce. These Heightened Security Measures are an intrusion on what we expect of what would still like to call a free country.

    Are we naive to believe that we deserve safety measure options which do not insult our privacy? Let me ask all of you out there. Shouldn’t there be an option for people who want to opt out?

    If you’ve forgotten the situation, just google the phrase “Express Jet pilot Michael Roberts” and you will find plenty of news about this pilot who may become the poster child or figurehead of a grassroots backlash against airport screening technology.

    He’s the pilot who flew through Memphis International Airport for years until the TSA told him he could not fly if he did not go through the new scans and be subjected to a full body pat down.

    See that charming graphic sample above? It is not Michael Roberts. But whoever it is, it is certainly an intrusion.

    (The image is not supposed to be recorded, according to the TSA) yet the scanners do have that capability. Minors in the UK are protected from these scans because of fears of child pornography. Adults do not have that protection. Seems like they should.

    And purely in an emotional sense, the eerie images themselves look as if the subject were bathed in radiation, which would jump start all kinds of cancers, make ones hair fall out and have assorted negative health effects, especially over time. Which type of health effects would depend on whether an X-ray backscatter vs millimeter wave were used. In 78 US airports, 247 so-called backscatter machines are installed made by Rapiscan Systems which expose a person to about 0.0025 millirem of radiation (239 are the other type of machine so I can’t tell about those.) What if they malfunction? What if Rapiscan or components goof. People are flawed, we make mistakes. What if like the Cedars Sinai radiation cases, they put out 7-8 times the radiation they are supposed to? TSA agents will get the worst of it. And pilots and airport personnel who have to undergo these scans, sometimes daily. So what if it is not like the immediate disaster in Japan; long term regular exposure—like 4 years worth of weekly scans—could be just as bad, or worse, maybe 50 years down the road like Mesothelioma.

    So one of these scanners was installed at the Memphis International airport and in this (supposedly) free country, when a well-respected pilot objected, he was prevented from going to his job. Rather than my going off on living in a totalitarian state, let me here paste the link to his blog.

    And here are Michael’s own words on the subject:

    Michael Roberts:

    We just filed an amendment to our complaint with the District Court in D.C. – nothing earth shattering, but it’s got us back in the news a little bit recently. I also gave testimony to a Texas state legislature committee yesterday regarding a series of bills they’re looking at to outlaw TSA’s shenanigans at the state level. The fight goes on, whether the major media care to acknowledge it or not.

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    Never Forget

    Lives have been shattered by the events I record.

    I know you could drive a mid-seventies Cadillac Fleetwood through the gaps in these records, but that is partly because I generally write about an event only once, partly because my content is based on a couple of randomly gathered secondhand observations, partly because I do not follow up, and partly because I am not an expert. (I never claim to be an expert in anything but my own life experience.) How could I be? The actual investigations take years, and are based on combined expert opinions of a whole boatload of bona fide experts. I am only a bystander, a bystander of second-hand bystanders, in fact. The reporters who inform me frequently misstate, interpret or misinterpret the facts, or add little imaginary flourishes. I still do my best to get the facts out as accurately as I can.

    Official final reports are the result of the combined knowledge and experience of experts (some of whom have agendas and bias) in “air traffic control, operations, meteorology, human performance, structures, systems, powerplants, maintenance records, survival factors, aircraft performance, cockpit voice recorder, flight data recorder, and material factors,” interviewers, rescue observers and specialists as needed. Sometimes the reports are obfuscated by agenda, bias or politics.

    I am just another pair of eyes, and untrained eyes, at that.

    I never, or hardly ever, write about what happens in the seats. Ironically, this is what I write now as I sit in one of those seats myself. Picture me in the cabin of a flight to Argentina. A young family is also on this flight, with hyperactive children running up and down the aisle whenever possible. Picture an infant or two, their safety seats empty as their mothers rock them to still their tears, to the relief of the couple across the aisle, and the irritation of one of the flight attendants. Picture a couple of newlyweds off on their honeymoon, and another couple of newlyweds returning from their honeymoon. Students flying home for the holidays, others returning after. Vacationers in Hawaiianwear. Nearer to me, an assortment of business people in summer suits appropriate for Argentina in July. This accidental ensemble of humankind is engaged in various activities: thumbing through magazines, cloud gazing through the windows, watching movies, listening to music, reading, studying paperwork, connecting intimately in intense whispers (or avoiding) a seatmate, sleeping.

    Just as all around me are engaged in making it through the flight, in a moment precisely like this one, other lives were interrupted. Maybe it was an instant, maybe a four minute fall. Maybe there was no time to process what was happening, or enough time to feel horrible bone-deep terror, and to endure for long moments the fight-flight reflex while belted into a seat. The detail of each event through individual eyes is simultaneously unique and identical.

    I don’t write about these moments. It is too horrible to contemplate except in cases like when Chesley Burnett Sullenberger is making a miracle happen.

    Out of the generous experiences of the decades of a whole, full life, families want to remember their loved ones in their entirety. They don’t want or need to be haunted by the torment of that single moment of horror, a final dark exclamation point.

    So when I write about these terrible crashes, I talk about system failures, or spatial disorientation, ATC schedules, fumes, pressurization, sleepy pilots, malfunctioning radar, stick shakers or a couple hundred other possible causes I have seen frequently enough for them to become familiar even to a layman like me.
    But it is not about the machine. It is about those who boarded that flight in perfect trust, expecting to disembark and fill more decades with passion and life. It is always and only about the passenger.

    I don’t mention them.

    But not an article is written, not a character is typed that I forget that the only matter is the passenger and the family.

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  • Remembering September 11, 2011, Long May We Wave

    This day we are threatened by nature. Yesterday, the winds of Hurricane Harvey hammered Texas, and tomorrow Irma will be slamming Florida. It is a storm we will weather. We know we will, because we have lived through worse. We must remember this, because today is September tenth. And September 11, 2011 is a date no American can forget, marked as it is by four scars that will never heal. Four hijacked airliners carved the names of nearly three thousand victims into our memories, names written in blood. Three thousand names with more than three thousand families—and that is not even adding the number of injured, the number of rescuers, all losses that destroyed the innocence of our country. We were initiated on that day into a sad new world, scarred by tragedy that turned the sky from blue to red. How could we understand what was going on? The mass murder of our people, the senseless destruction, the planes crashing, buildings burning before our eyes. I’m just an ordinary guy. When it happened, I was bewildered by it all.

    On Sept 11, this day, in 2011, Flight 11 and Flight 175 hit the twin towers.

    The tragedy was filmed as it happened. We were glued to our screens, helpless, terrorized, mesmerized along with the international audience, the terrible scenes of desperate people making impossible choices: die in the burning towers, or jump to the unforgiving pavement. We cried, but we did not cry alone. The world cried with us.

    American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon, 64 aboard the plane and 125 in the impact, all fatalities.

    On Flight 93, we saw our people become heroes. We learned of Burnett, Beamer, and Bradshaw, of passengers fighting the hijackers. “Are you guys ready? Let’s roll.” They rolled into history as heroes. How many lives they saved by their actions—an incalculable number—and these were passengers who acted against the hijackers knowing they would lose their own.

    Children of today who ride airplanes are accustomed to today’s security protocols. It must be impossible for them to believe that there was a time when we simply walked aboard. There was no threat. But these days are different. We live in a world that irrevocably changed that day. It is a day we can never forget.

    We tightened our belts.
    We sharpened our defenses.
    And we are not alone in this. The whole world is a more vigilant place.

    The twin towers were a symbol of our prosperity, a couple of the world’s greatest buildings in one of the world’s greatest cities; and though the towers stand no more, our cities and our country goes on. The Pentagon was rebuilt. A Pennsylvania park commemorates the heroes of Flight 93.

    I certainly mourn those who were lost on September 11; and I feel for the families of the injured, as I believe we all do. I may mourn our loss of innocence, but I can also take pride that we stand now, scarred perhaps, but stronger because of what we have survived. We have taken measures to make our world safer, but we can never relax our vigilance. We can never such a thing to happen to us again. On the ashes of the towers, we rebuilt. Some of us are still rebuilding. On the ashes of history, we rise.

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  • Cost of Aviation

    If you want to see the most current mappings of the ash, here’s the British meteorological service site.

    As I sit here in a foreign country separated from my home by an ocean and a sky full of volcanic ash they are saying may disrupt trans-atlantic aviation for the next six months, and wondering when I will get home, I read the chilling words of a American scrivener remembering the recent flight that wiped out the Polish “politocracy.”

    Michael White: “An airplane is a hollow bullet filled with humans lives, shot from a gun we call an airport. Should it impact with the ground other than according to the dictates of precise technology, its content perishes.”

    Those of us who fly so often take for granted that flight is a right, but every so often, Nature reminds us we are not birds, we are Icarus, daring to fly too close to the sun. We are creatures of the earth. We have no wings beyond those our imagination have wrought.

    Who among us can say it is worth the cost, especially those people I work with every day who have lost their nearest and dearest.

    And yet, how we have flown.


    Click to viewPhoto of the ash cloud

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  • The Next Chapter

    When has an aviation disaster so changed an entire nation?

    The world is asking “What next for Poland?”

    No answers now, only questions. Only time will tell.

    The speaker of the lower house of parliament, Bronislaw Komorowski will get the ball rolling on presidential elections that will come early.

    Piotr Wiesiolek, a Central Bank deputy governor will temporarily assume the governorship.

    No crystal ball is needed to know that the next hierarchy will sort itself out after the crash of Polish politics. Whether the cream will rise to the top or mediocrity stand-in until a new equilibrium surfaces, the dynamics of the Polish political machines will adapt. That in itself is nothing new. Everything changes; it is the way of the world.

    It is not possible now or even fair to say that Poland will heal. Healing is not always an accurate word. What is meant, perhaps, is scab over, or scar, bearing in mind that how a scar heals determines if it remains a weakness, or becomes stronger than ever. There will be a time in which to convalesce. It is too soon, possibly even a cruelty– to speak of recovery now. The country needs time. Poland will endure as anyone does who has suffered tragedy, but eventually it will recoup its losses. Now is not the time to speak of the buoyancy of the human spirit, but to walk through the stages of mourning, and for other countries—without intrusion—like siblings, lend their strength where they can. Words can mean little now, but the free world shares in the mourning of the Polish people.

    In the sixties, Dr. Kubler-Ross postulated five stages of grief: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance; but I prefer the more recent model of seven stages which adds at the end, reconstruction and hope.

    Poland will eventually be all right. Not without scars, of course but however dim it seems now, there will be a light at the end of the tunnel.

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