The sky-high terror of a flight without life jackets

Richard Orange
14 Jul 2009

The terror finally took hold of my companion when the air hostess started demonstrating how to wrap your hands around your seat cushion in the event of crashing into the sea.

Jet Konnect, the new low-cost offering from Jet Airlines, has apparently done away with life jackets, something even Ryanair's Michael O'Leary, with his new "pay to pee" policy, has yet to suggest. Other Indian low-cost airlines, I've since been told, do the same, and it's not surprising.

According to IATA, Indian carriers last year accounted for almost a quarter of the estimated $9 billion (£5.5 billion) the industry lost worldwide, while carrying only 2% of global traffic. Private carriers Jet Air and Kingfisher are deeply in the red.

But Air India is faring still worse. It lost nearly $1 billion last year, and its struggle with its $4 billion debt pile has become such a national crisis that Tata group chairman Ratan Tata has even been approached to lead a new emergency board.

The response of all three has been to trim their services and join the country's low-cost airlines (hence the lack of life jackets). But Kapil Kaul at the Centre for Aviation in Delhi says this will make the situation worse.

There will be still more low-cost airlines and they will be competing, not with full-service airlines, but with each other. This will only compound the underlying problem: that the businessmen running India's airlines are willing to offer fares that guarantee losses.

"Indians have a tremendous appetite for losing money," says Kaul. "In most other markets, these airlines would have closed."

But by the time the monsoon winds began throwing our plane around, my friend was far too hysterical to show much gratitude.

On the ground, India's industry is picking up strongly, growing 2.7% in May - double what economists had predicted, despite a continuing fall in exports. Predictably, it has revived last year's talk of "decoupling" India's economy from the West. I've never understood why, when India's economy was growing at above 5% and Britain's shrinking the fastest in three decades, "decoupling" became the "decoupling myth".

Ratan Tata's Uncle Jeh started Air India, then Tata Airlines, back in 1932. But Ratan is nonetheless likely to decide that his ailing British industrial empire is trouble enough. But at least the new XJ Jaguar rolled out last week, its second hit in a row with the critics, is making it a bit clearer what possessed him to buy the loss-prone luxury car company in the first place. A friend who consults on the Indian car industry emailed me excitedly: "Did you see the new Jaguar XJ? Phew, wot a scorcher!"