Editorial: Air scare

CHENNAI: Several things changed for air travellers around the world in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in New York City in 2001. Chief among them was the idea that commercial air travel was the safest mode of transportation. The statistics might bat in favour of aviation — the average annual injury rate for air travel is .01 injuries per 100 million passenger miles travelled, compared with 48 injuries for the same distance travelled in cars and trucks. But all it takes is one 'bomb scare' to unravel a significant portion of our air travel network, throwing into disarray the schedules of thousands of passengers and airlines, and entailing losses running into hundreds of crores.

In the backdrop of as many as 100 flights of Indian origin bearing the brunt of hoax bomb threats, it might help to examine the financial implications of such scares, especially in the context of a resource-heavy and process-intensive sector like aviation. Per industry experts, the processes of diversion, deplaning, and security re-checks are nightmares for the airlines concerned as they tend to burn cash for every repeated routine. The additional cost of fuelling, catering, and airport charges set the airline back by around Rs 12 lakh per hour. The longer that an operator takes to resume its operations, the more they end up paying. According to some studies, the cost of every such diversion could run up to Rs 50 lakh. That’s just one side of the expense sheet; on the other end is the requirement to bear the accommodation costs for all passengers and the airline crew in the event of a lengthy delay.

Let’s not forget, if it’s an international route that we are talking about, the protocol would entail assigning a new crew if the ones onboard have exceeded their work hours. But such problems might seem surmountable when you take into account the daddy of all issues — fuel dumping. A Boeing 777 weighs between 340-350 tonnes with passengers, baggage, and cargo. If the flight is to make an unplanned return or diversion, it is faced with a huge challenge as its maximum landing weight is just about 250 tonnes. To carry out a safe landing, the crew must flush out close to 100 tonnes of fuel (which would have ideally been used up had it landed in its intended destination). The wastage of fuel alone coughs up a bill of Rs 1 crore, as ATF is priced at nearly Rs 1 lakh per tonne. This was something that the AI 119 flight that took off from Mumbai last week, and was supposed to land at New York’s JFK Airport, had to deal with.

The bomb scare episodes have rattled the national aviation industry and the Centre to such an extent that the government plans to take legislative actions to deal with instances of bomb threats to airlines, including placing perpetrators of such threats in the no-fly list and awarding them jail time. Amendments are being planned to aviation security rules as well as the Suppression of Unlawful Acts Against Safety of Civil Aviation Act, 1982. The Bureau of Civil Aviation Security (BCAS) is also in touch with the Ministry of Home Affairs. That’s because non-state actors could use the bomb scare tactic to engage in financial terrorism, paralysing mobility, instilling a sense of uncertainty in citizens, entailing losses for the industry, while denting India’s reputation on the national security front.