Airborne in Airports

Aviation in India seems to move at the speed of light these days. Time was when air travel in a domestic carrier was subject to the wishes of the mandarins that roamed those innovatively named counters called customer services. The customer would service the airlines and its indeterminable flying schedules by having to change his routine, route or reactions to travel cancellations, delays and unpredictability – not necessarily in that order.

The travails would continue till he touched down on the right airport. The question of landing a flight on the correct airport tarmac may cause you to wonder whether all that which went up in the name of Indian Airlines came down at the designated place on earth. Almost always, I assume. Which is not that bad a record. A personal experience that I went through, some years ago, prompted me to include this uncertainty as one of the hurdles one had to cross before you were assured of walking across the arrival lounge with your head held high instead of being retrieved from a corn field, having been mistaken for a MIG-21 pilot!

I was on a flight from Calcutta to Agartala (Tripura) around eleven years ago. We had flown over Bangladesh (the Indo-Bangla border incidentally, runs along the outer wall of the Agartala airport) when the announcement had just been made that the plane would be landing in a few minutes. Peering out the window, I took in the quaint landscape that breathed through the rolling countryside down below.

The plane descended sharply and touched down with the rattle of an oxcart traveling across the dry Tons river of Dehradun (where the whole world's pebbles seem to exist underfoot)! As soon as it did land, it swung this way and that, and then all of a sudden, picked up speed and dash on the tarmac, the kind that you would associate with a nervous space shuttle challenger taking off, when chased by Osama and his suicide bombers.

In a flash, the plane aimed its nose towards the stars and was hurtling up the sky like a diarrhoea-hit rocket, keen to complete its job before it got worse! I don’t know what a diarrhoea-hit rocket looks like, but I sure now know how passengers sitting inside such flying objects look! I was facing the sky as the angle changed (as did all my fellow passengers). A couple of unlucky, embarrassed ones burst out rather untimely from inside their toilets, wrenched out during the process of undressing. And all of a sudden, the plane was climbing as if it had been released from Cape Canaveral and in a moment, the earth was due to appear like a little irrelevant dot in the distance! Though Columbia hadn’t crashed till then, you could spot the ghosts of the Kandahar hijacking being re-run in everybody’s eyes!

This continued for a few minutes, as the shocked passengers regained composure and demanded to know why they were being forced to become unwilling astronauts. It seemed there were few people, if any, in the aircraft that day who knew the right answers. And the crew was certainly not one of them. The aircraft regained its regular trajectory soon after and proceeded to land safely, although without as much as an apology from the people who flew us. It was only later did the news come through that the initial landing had happened at a wrong, unauthorized airfield, used originally for World War II purposes.

My first reaction was that I had now known what it was to have flown with a modern day Don Quixote as a pilot – someone who was still doing duties as a fighter pilot against the Japs almost sixty years on, and had landed on a World War strip after flying like he was doing a valiant dogfight manouevre. The Agartala airport is a storehouse of many anecdotes, most of which can be left for another day.

Though private airlines have sped up travel and customer service (safety is still a concern), the one thing that refuses to change is the audio system in most airports in India. The funny aspect is that each time such a cacophony would start off in the airport, conversations would die and everyone would be hooked onto this incomprehensible balderdash. Immediately afterwards, people’s faces would contort; they would either be asking each other for clarification of the audio-message through silent messages or would be blasting the sound system as the announcement ended, depending on the level of urgency about catching a flight. Some years ago, Amar Bose of Bose Sound Systems offered to rework the noisy systems at our international airports for free, as a gift to his country of birth. The offer was turned down for unexplained reasons. The result is that the country that has produced the innovations of Bose still prefers noise to sound.

The Mumbai airport may have changed a lot but the approach from the sky hasnt! An incident I particularly remember is when I had to sit with the pilots in the cockpit since the airlines had sold one seat more than what could be accommodated! These were pre-911 times when aeroplanes still landed on flat pieces of earth rather than vertical objects of concrete and steel. Since they ran out of seats, I was happy to volunteer for a seat in the cockpit when offered one. The flight was bound for Mumbai and the pilot, a former Air Force officer, was generous enough to show me how the controls functioned and what those blinking lights all over the panels meant.

When we were about to land, I struggled to find the runway as all I could see was hundreds of shanties, hutments and chawls huddled together right under where I presumed the wheels of the airplane may have been. As I almost braced myself for a crash landing, and this time in the airport of the finance capital of modern India rather than a deserted World War II runway, out came from the miles and miles of shanties below, a black line that seemed at first to be a narrow lane between two rows of hutments. The line grew thicker and thicker and broader into a strip of road. The shanties around kept growing bigger too and I saw long rows of people, crouched like Wimbledon ball-boys, distanced at strategically planned intervals, and relieving themselves – the noise and wind of a passing airplane perhaps conditioning nature’s call. The strip kept growing till it emerged as the full-fledged tarmac of Mumbai’s Santa Cruz airport – the doorway to the emerging economic power of the world where I eventually landed.