Why the aviation minister is right in putting Jet Airways bomb hoax suspect on 'no-fly' list
In a bid to curb the rising menace of bomb hoaxes at Indian airports and in flights, civil aviation minister Ashok Gajapati Raju said that the person responsible for bomb threat on-board a Mumbai-Delhi Jet Airways flight on Monday, has been put on a "no-fly list".
In a welcome step, Gajapati Raju has asked all airlines to ban from flying the passenger, who has been identified, for disrupting flight 9W 339, a Boeing 737-900, by raising a hijack threat.
Grappling with the rising menace of hoax calls made to airports in the country, airlines, airport operators and the aviation safety regulator, Bureau of Civil Aviation Security, have for long demanded strict punishment for such miscreants.
This is the first time that the government has asked the airlines to put a person on a "no-fly list" that was made operational recently.
The Jet Airways flight had to make an emergency landing at Ahmedabad airport on Monday after an "on-board security threat" was recovered. A crew member found a printed note threatening to blow up the plane mid-air unless it was diverted to Pakistan occupied Kashmir.
The passenger, who has reportedly been identified as Salla Birju - a business class traveller of the same aircraft - had allegedly kept the note in the aircraft's lavatory. Birju has reportedly confessed that he had kept the note to destabilise operations in the flight.
The aviation minister's step is important because such calls have a huge economic and human cost attached to them. More than 100 hoax calls were received in the past three years at Indian airports. Delhi received the maximum number of such calls followed by Mumbai and Bangalore.
What's worrying is that the number of such threats has gone up in the last two years. According to government data, there were 14 hoax threats in 2014. The figure grew to 34 in 2015, and rose to 54 in 2016. Till July this year, 32 such threats related to bombs in flights or airports were received.
In January, a Kathmandu-bound Jet Airways flight with 111 people on board was halted minutes before take-off from Delhi's Indira Gandhi International airport after a bomb threat. In February, Mumbai's Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport received an anonymous call threatening to blow up the facility. In September, bomb threat on a flight to Hong Kong sent the security agencies into a tizzy.
It appears as if miscreants are taking a cue from each other and indulging in this behaviour with absolute disregard for the troubles it causes to the myriad travellers, ground staff, security officials and the airlines at large.
In a written reply to a question in Lok Sabha on hoax calls in flights and airports, minister of state for civil aviation Jayant Sinha said that it is difficult to quantify the loss in monetary terms. Aviation industry sources, however, peg the loss at crores of rupees.
According to statistics, 40 bomb hoaxes were received at Delhi airport in the last three years while Mumbai and Bangalore received 17 and 14 calls each. All these airports are run by the Delhi International Airport Limited (DIAL), a consortium led by the GMR Group. The parking charges of airports run DIAL are higher than those run by the Airport Authority of India. Also, the disruption in the schedule of each flight has a cascading effect on the schedule of other fights too. It is difficult to imagine the havoc wreaked by each such call.
If computing the economic loss caused by such calls is difficult, assessing the human cost is almost impossible. People take flights for business meetings, seeing different parts of the world, attending marriages and even funerals. A delay of a couple of hours can deprive someone of that chance to catch the last glimpse of the dead ones or miss out on an important interview. What may appear as a "little fun" to some can make a huge difference to someone's life.
Security personnel responsible for ensuring a safe travel for passengers work under high stress and tremendous pressure ensuring nothing prohibited or dangerous finds its way to the aircraft. Such hoaxes add to the pressure on the staff in combing flights and aiport zones where there is otherwise absolutely no such need.
Those who do not understand or respect the norms of civilised behaviour and those who disrupt the smooth functioning of processes must be barred for life from the right to fly.
A strong deterrent is the only plausible solution to the problem.