Did KFA and Air India Failure Teach Govt any Lesson?

Bangalore: Kingfisher’s destiny is almost done in the backdrop of the declaration of a partial lockout of the company after its employees have gone on strike followed by the non-payment of their salaries and based on some safety issues. But, it seems that the authorities are least concerned about the airline’s flying business; no steps have been taken so far to help the aviation industry as well.

When the KFA employee agitation got started and the engineers started not certifying the airworthiness of the aircrafts, the immediate response from the Civil Aviation Minister Ajit Singh was “if there is a safety issue with Kingfisher, we will close it down,” reports R Jagannathan of Firstpost.com. With no salaries paid for months, and with the company’s financial position at stake, how one can expect its pilots to fly the aircrafts safely?

Meanwhile, the former Director General of Civil Aviation, E K Bharat Bhushan, who was about to take decisive moves for Kingfisher, was replaced just when he wanted cancel the aircraft’s flying permits. Bharat Bhushan was annoyed as the aircraft had not submitted its recovery plan for the past several months. “This is completely unacceptable. We are very concerned and in a day or two we will come to a decision on Kingfisher,” Bhushan told to Firstpost.com in the month of July this year.

It was then that he got replaced by the government, allowing Kingfisher to struggle for two more months; it became all the more difficult to deal with the situation as the time passed by. More sarcastically, Bhushan, who raised the issue about the missing documents in the DGCA’s file on Kingfisher’s safety surveillance, was posted in the steel ministry.

All these indicate that the government does not want the aircraft to die easily. In our country’s market-based economy; not letting the failures die is as stupid a strategy as forcing all the other competitors and the whole industry fail.