Air rage soars at 35,000ft

India has been witnessing a spurt in cases of unruly air passenger behavior of late. But what separates us from the rest of the world is the treatment such cases receive here. "At the most, in India, a police complaint is filed against the passenger. The passenger gets bail and the airline does not pursue the case," says George Abraham, Asia-Pacific chairman of civil aviation of the International Transport Workers Federation (ITF). The only passenger to ever spend about a month in judicial custody was Jitender Kumar Mohala, a 42-year old chartered accountant who was arrested last year for aggression on board an IndiGo Goa-Delhi flight that caused the pilot to sound a hijack alert.
But air rage in India isn't a new phenomenon. Way back in 2000, the ITF had organised an international action week against unruly passenger behaviour in over 200 airports, including those in India. The demand was that the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) should adopt stringent legislation to plug the legal loopholes that are exploited by disruptive passengers when airlines take them to court. The week culminated in a one-minute symbolic protest strike on July 6, the day Richard Branson, chairman of UK's Virgin Atlantic, arrived with much fanfare riding an elephant to Delhi airport to launch Virgin's inaugural flight to London.
"Check-in was in progress for the inaugural flight. The then aviation minister Sharad Yadav, Branson and others were present when counter staff suddenly stopped work at 12 noon and displayed placards and posters on Zero Air Rage. At 12:01, they got back to work," says Gabriel Mocho, secretary, civil aviation, ITF, London. Yadav promised to take appropriate action. But it remained only a promise.
Branson probably did not mind the interruption — a couple of years earlier, he had spearheaded a campaign against Steven Handy, a passenger who broke the vodka bottle on a flight attendant's head. Branson engineered a British lifetime ban on air travel for Handy, and thus began the UK airline industry's "zero tolerance" approach towards unruly passengers. The Virgin Atlantic chairman also urged airlines to establish a worldwide air rage database to blacklist the worst offenders. However, though some airlines in Europe and the US have independent blacklists, neither is a worldwide air rage list in place nor have the loopholes in the existent laws been plugged.
20/03/10 Manju V/Times of India

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Categories: Safety Mar 2010