Need to stand by staff in tough times: IndiGo

The October-December 2022 period has seen record levels of demand for air travel since the onset of the pandemic, and a rise in incidents involving unruly passengers.

IndiGo’s chief executive officer Pieter Elbers said that while the two are not directly related, airlines have seen a rise in unruly passenger behaviour since the covid-related restrictions were lifted.

“It is not only in India, but a global thing that sometimes on board an aircraft, people get frustrated or angry, or certain incidents on board an aircraft happens, which also happens a lot on other modes of transportation. However, whatever happens in airlines get a lot of attention. We train our crew for that, and I am proud of our cabin crew dealing with these situations. I think it is our job as management to support our crew and our staff in difficult situations, and in difficult times,” Elbers said while addressing reporters at an inaugural event of Manohar International airport at Mopa in Goa.

In the past few weeks, four incidents involving unruly passengers have been reported, including a heated argument between a passenger and a cabin crew on board IndiGo’s Istanbul-Delhi flight on 16 December, and a mid-air scuffle among passengers, disregarding safety protocols on Thai Airways’ Bangkok-Kolkata flight on 26 December. A 26 November incident has come to light of a passenger urinating on a female business class passenger on Air India’s New York-Delhi flight and a similar incident on a Paris-Delhi flight last month.

“I don’t think it is connected to recovery in traffic but we could see that people were very focused on hygiene measures during travel throughout covid and, now with all the covid measures gone, we are basically back to the way people used to travel prior to covid. So, there is probably an element to it,” he added, without highlighting any particular incident. Elbers, who has completed four months as IndiGo’s CEO, is happy with the healthy growth in air traffic, and is betting big on codeshare partnerships to build IndiGo as a global brand before operating longer international routes. It is also considering connecting destinations both in the US and Canada under the codeshare partnerships as the next step, said Vinay Malhotra, head of global sales, IndiGo.

The airline has codeshare partnerships with Turkish Airlines, Qatar Airways, Air France, Virgin Atlantic, Qantas, KLM, and American Airlines.

“Today, IndiGo is the seventh largest airline in the world, and the brand awareness in India is super, but outside India, it is little known. The codeshares in international expansion are helping us to prepare for A321XLRs (extra long range),” he said.

The budget airline has over 290 planes in its fleet, and 500 aircraft are in the pipeline, out of which 69 are expected to be A321XLRs. While the delivery of XLRs is likely to start from 2024, it remains to be seen whether Airbus can meet the timeline considering the supply chain issues of engines and parts.

However, Elbers said IndiGo is using the time to prepare its brand globally so that the airline is ready to add destinations as and when it is ready with its XLR capacity. Besides, over 10% of IndiGo’s fleet is grounded due to the disruptions in engine and spare part supplies.

The reporter is in Goa at the invitation of IndiGo.