Airlines hit out at concerted campaign to paint Indian aviation as unsafe

IndiGo, SpiceJet, Vistara, Air India, AirAsia, GoAir are all being shunted by flyers for safety reasons, claims a controversial survey that has been strongly contested by airlines who say it has been done at the pretext of players who have vested interest to fan such fears.

The survey says that due to safety reasons 86% of passengers are avoiding booking flights on India's top three airlines - SpiceJet, IndiGo and Air India. Another 18% are avoiding booking GoAir, 12% on AirAsia, 6% on Vistara indicating that no airline is safe to travel.

A misreporting campaign, said sources, is being run to scare flyers from existing airlines and at the behest of a new player.

They point to a sudden support in tweets by influencers when a SpiceJet plane was diverted to Karachi recently. An influencer sitting in London, who had never tweeted on aviation, suddenly started tweeting on the incident. A politician who is under investigation by multiple agencies and writer-activist famous for her hit-job tweets, too became very active. Similar tweets by multiple influencers appeared all over.

"Diverting to the nearest airport is a global best practise and something encouraged by all airlines," said an official.

But who stands to gain from branding all Indian airlines as "unsafe" and pointing fingers and pressurising the DGCA to act? Who is fanning this fire?

"There is so much baseless reporting that the DGCA had to finally step in and clarify," said another airline official.

"On average about 30 incidents do take place, including go-around, missed approaches, diversion, medical emergencies, weather, technical and bird hits. Most of them have no safety implications," DGCA Arun Kumar said.

"The way misleading reports appeared it looked like a concerted campaign to malign existing players which would wean away travellers," said an official.

SpiceJet, when contacted, said it had the highest load factor for seven years now and there was no dip in demand. IndiGo and Vistara officials too said the demand was very strong and denied misleading reports.

Most airlines termed the survey as "bogus". "Such fake stories and social media campaigns would not help new players attract passengers. It is sad that such things are being done," said an official.