Indigo Airline Staff Manhandling Passenger: How to Avoid Such Shameful Acts?

Violence of all kinds, except for exceptional law enforcement, is deplorable and needs to be deplored by modern civilized society. And therefore such violence and violation of human dignity of similar kinds need to be taken seriously with an earnest objective for avoidance of such things in the future.

And my immediate provocation for writing this blog today is this  Youtube Video which is getting viral from yesterday onward in the social media.

The video shows a decently dressed man in his early late fifties or early sixties, apparently an airline passenger, visibly agitated by some thing, near an Indigo Airline Airport Transit Bus getting surrounded, isolated and mercilessly beaten in the most humiliating manner by some fellows in airline ground staff uniform.

I felt too bad and I felt as if my dignity getting violated by these young men who were otherwise supposed to be helping hands to people like me at the airports!

I couldn't believe such a thing, that too from the employees of an Indian airline I have all reasons to admire so far. Obviously I wanted to know more and got much from the following:

Times of India Online declared it as 'shocking'.

There were some coverage in other media as well.

The following is the gist of things I learnt:

The incident took place in New Delhi Airport apparently on 15th October 2017.

The manhandled passenger was travelling from Chennai to Delhi by Indigo flight.

The passenger was agitated by some kind of poor service (reason either not investigated fully and not yet made public!) The demanding passenger irked the wrath of some of the concerned airline ground staff who went berserk to teach the passenger a lesson! Obviously that was not something airline employees are supposed to be trained or briefed. No is taught to put a cockroach in the bread and butter they are supposed to eat! But here they preferred that way for reasons known to them.

Airline business is deemed  to be a polished and polite service to ladies and gentlemen. Their customers are generally not 'cattle class' though some may think otherwise sometimes.

Airlines which tolerate arrogance from the part of their employees are bound to get grounded very quickly. Airline business is indeed a delicate one with much issues affectin its survival and sustainability.

Indigo Airlines of India is one most Indians like me admired. They had a tremendous growth from inception. It has been a low cost carrier and even then, it proved to be a successful business model by appealing things like discipline, punctuality and the like.

It was employee indiscipline and arrogance coupled with corruption, incompetence and inefficiency that almost killed the national public sector airline. The management and staff of Indian airlines and Air India developed their self defeating culture from the days of airline monopoly.

But privatization paved the way for competition and opportunities for improvement.

Sustaining competence in management and leadership is a vital factor for sustaining competition and sustaining business success.

Often business success brings in complacency. And when that happens, both employees and management teams develop arrogance and a tendency to close eyes towards initial signs of future destruction.

In the news above, some things are obvious signs for Indigo for their future sustenance:

They can punish an employee or two for their unruly behavior or cover up the incident by some meaningless apologies in the public.

But if they are serious to sustain, they should honestly investigate to find out the reasons for the following:

1. What caused the passenger to lose his cool in the airport at his arrival?

2. What caused the ground staff to lose their cool when a passenger gets agitated?

3. Why did the higher supervisory management of the airline encouraged a cover up action initially by suspending their employee who took the viral video? In fact they should have encouraged free flow of information from within that exposed aberrations for self corrections!

4. Was it a minor issue or sign of something seriously fuming inside?  

There could be more.

I personally do not like any business to disintegrate for whatever reason. In the free trade capitalism, we may justify business ventures getting ruined due to overall incompetency. But any legally acceptable and successful business getting ruined is not a good thing for the country. It affects not only the shareholders, the employees the management, but others like the customers, the suppliers and all. And somewhere in the links me and you too exist.

And it pains.

Let us hope Indigo Airlines would not be a reason for that!