In a repeat of the United Airlines incident with Dr David Dao, this time in India, airline employees have gotten too big for their boots. It turns out, last month, IndiGo Airlines passenger Rajeev Katyal, a 53-year old passenger of IndiGo, was restrained, manhandled and also assaulted by employees of the airline at the Delhi airport after he arrived on flight 6E 487 from Chennai to Delhi.
According to a news channel, the passenger seemed to have an argument with the airline staff after deboarding the plane.
Like you’d see he is stopped from boarding the bus that would take him from the tarmac to the terminal building, not verbally but by touching his hand, and he is restrained and then throttled by the airline staff.
The airline has put out an apology about it after about three weeks when the issue came out in the open, which could be a tacit admission of their fault.
We truly apologise to Mr. Rajiv Katiyal for this incident & assure him that the employee has been terminated. pic.twitter.com/9xZcSftgit
— IndiGo (@IndiGo6E) November 7, 2017
Heck, even the CEO of the airline admits to their fault.
We condemn the actions of our staff & have taken stern action. We truly apologize for this. Such behavior is unacceptable – @AdityaGhosh6E pic.twitter.com/lGNT8An7rQ
— IndiGo (@IndiGo6E) November 7, 2017
Interestingly, the airline employee who shot the video was the one who was terminated and the ones who beat up the passenger were let off after a warning.
It is truly shabby that the airline chose to side with the perpetrators of the unruly activity and threw out the guy who did the right thing asking for the wrong to be right. Also beats me why Indigo’s pride is turning to Indigo’s haughtiness, and I hope the powers to take the right action against the responsible people to ensure this never happens again.
What do you make of this hugely wrong situation on the hand of IndiGo?
I personally like Indigo airlines, the flight fleet is good, they are on time and I know how hard it is to make that happen amidst the day-to-day challenges. This is a very unfortunate incident. The employees definitely need more training in handling passengers respectfully no matter what the situation was, but from the video it appears that the passenger also tried to hit one of the employees which is also not acceptable. It would also be good to give a complete clarification on what led to this whole chain of events, and why the airline employees were trying to stop the passenger from boarding the bus, without which it is not right to judge either side.
Whatever the case May be, even if the passenger was aggressive or offensive, the airline staff should have handed him over to police and under no circumstances the airline staff should behave in this manner.
One of the reason I avoid LCC because of the staff behaviour let it be indigo, Spicejet or Go air, earlier days Air Deccan the staff was ill mannered and were treating passengers without any compassion. I have also seen Passengers behaving irresponsibly, abusing Air Deccan staff
The passenger in question presumably got ticked off at the manner in which passengers were being instructed by airline staff at the time of boarding the bus, he seems to have responded by saying FO to the airline staff. The airline staff did not take too kindly to it and the whole thing went south from there.
Takeaways:
1) Don’t abuse strangers, no matter what the provocation. You never know who you are dealing with.
2) The airline staff clearly got very macho in their response, there was no call for behaving the way they did. I find Indigo management response pathetic, since they fired the staffer who filmed the incident but let the two rambos off with a warning. Those two got off easy, to say the least.
3) It’s easy to say I won’t fly Indigo in the future etc, but a large part of this incident also has to do with the overall sense of aggression in our society today, people are all too happy to let off steam and the end result can be brutal.
Well, here is another tweet by PV Sindhu. Even she wasn’t spared by IndiGo staff.
https://twitter.com/Pvsindhu1/status/926702603324473344
I don’t understand what they said, but it looks like they wouldn’t let him board and he still tried to board the bus and that’s when they had to pull him back. At that point, it still wasn’t in an aggressive manner. Then he became the aggressor and tried to shove the airline staff. Without knowing the reason why he wasn’t allowed to board, I wouldn’t be comfortable siding with the passenger. What if he made some dumb comment and said he had a bomb, then the airline staff is well within their rights and protocol to deny him boarding onto the bus.
This wasn’t boarding. This happened at arrivals. What’s the point then to deny boarding on bus unless you want to manhandle customer from get go?
did we watch the same video? that guy is out of control and the passenger escalates the violence. he is hammer fisting that dude’s face…
These guys are covering up, when more than one staff is involved you sacked only one?