Another one bites the dust

Air Costa is the most recent name in a long list of airlines closing down

Don’t ask me why but for the last few weeks Queen’s “Another one bites the dust” has been playing in my mind all the time. Every time I look at any newspaper — especially the business ones — the lyrics spring out at me louder than ever.

Are you ready, hey, are you ready for this?/ Are you hanging on the edge of your seat?/ Out of the doorway the bullets rip/ To the sound of the beat/ Another one bites the dust/ Another one bites the dust/ And another one gone, and another one gone/Another one bites the dust/ Hey, I’m gonna get you, too/ Another one bites the dust.

Who is going to get them? The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) I suppose!

Then I shake myself out of it and get back to reading the drama that is playing out… which — yawn — sounds like a repeat of 2012. Only the cast is smaller and slightly different.

I refer to the gradual demise of Air Costa. And my mind goes back to the fall from grandeur of Kingfisher Airlines — the promoter of which seems to be missing from our midst today. I have to say I miss Vijay Mallya and all his silly quotes of how he was trying to revive the airline, who all were wooing him and which foreign carrier was keen to pay him absurd sums of money for a stake in his sinking carrier — stuff that for some odd reason most of the media took as the gospel truth and reported verbatim almost daily. Mallya till the very end had many media — and a few industry people — convinced that he was in fact trying to extract the best price from these clever foreign airline predators. He refused to sell cheap like his weak-kneed pal Naresh Goyal.

Such a sense of déjà vu. Air Costa has 450 employees. Most haven’t been paid salaries for the last few months. In February it stopped flying. Before it shut shop, it was doing 16 flights a day to eight destinations. Forty pilots have quit at last count. The spokesperson keeps saying they are trying to raise money. The promoters have been very quiet — so quiet that I still don’t know their names. Experts — they spring up overnight with numbers pulled out of a hat — say it needs Rs 200 crore to get restarted. The airline’s monthly wage bill alone is Rs 4 crore. Don’t ask me whether that’s high or low. That seems like an irrelevant detail now.

And the two Embraers? I presume they are on lease from some leasing company routed through one of those tax havens. The lessors are probably already trying to get their aircraft back. They probably haven’t been paid for a while either. This is all a flight of fancy by the way — lest some reader take everything I am saying seriously.

And the aviation ministry? And DGCA? They are the ones who actually have all the fun. Airlines shutting down here in India is treated as business as usual and entry and exits are to be expected. Think NEPC, MDLR, Damania, East West, Paramount, Kingfisher… the list goes on and on. I don’t know if the present regime is taking it more seriously but I have found in the past that no one is particularly concerned. While that may make sense — after all most businesses see entry and exits — one fallout is that leasing companies and lenders globally are understandably getting quite wary of Indian players.

If you visited the minister’s house during the Kingfisher days (Ajit Singh’s tenure) or even Rajiv Gandhi Bhawan, there were always wild stories doing the rounds. Unlikely buy-outs. Everyone was linked — via marriages — to everyone else, however unlikely the pairing sounded. Two people sighted together at the Taj or the Maurya and all hell would broke loose.

People always threw around the name of Sharad Pawar. For as long as I have covered aviation, I have heard his name — sometimes whispered reverentially and sometimes cursed soundly. What he really has to do with it all no one has really figured out till date. Goyal was often blamed for a lot of things he probably wasn’t even fully in the know of — although — considering he lived then in London — he was surprisingly in the know about most things at most times. Powerful Patel proved quite helpless in the end. Despite his blessings, his friend Mallya went down.

Of course Air Costa is too small to matter really — just a new name to be added to an already pretty long list. Queen should have been around to sing aloud.