Lunch with BS: Shakti Lumba shares his journey as pilot, operations expert

'If the DGCA is autonomous and not just a statutory body, we will become a mature aviation country. And it needs to be headed by a technical expert, not a babu', says Lumba

As he fetches his hearing aid before we sit down to chat, Shakti Lumba mimics the sound of plane engines to explain that 40 years of life inside the cockpit have left him hard of hearing.

Lumba, a pilot who has donned the hats of airline executive as well as union leader, has recently penned his memoirs, The Old Bold Pilot, to present to the lay reader a peek into Indian aviation through his personal journey. I am at his house in Mangar village of Faridabad, Haryana, barely an hour away from Delhi, at his insistence to host lunch.

His book is a pacy retelling of how he pursued a childhood dream of flying into the skies “to bring back” his father, who died when Lumba was only two years old. It reflects an adrenaline-pumping, macho world of pilots although it dwells on aspects other than the flying experience, such as lessons from mishaps, operations and management. And there’s a mine of information there, given that Lumba was instrumental in setting up budget carrier IndiGo’s operations in 2005, besides heading national carrier Air India's regional arm, Alliance Air, possibly India’s first low-cost carrier.

On a murky weekday, I am pleased to get away from Delhi to a valley gazing at the encircling Aravalli hills. “The air is better here,” assures Lumba, whose house with a mud-coloured façade stands on Laksh Farms, a sprawling seven-acre plot that he retired to 11 years ago.

The 71-year-old, dressed in a blue full-sleeved t-shirt, black Nehru jacket and trousers, and a pair of slip-ons, had been listening to music in the veranda. He gets up to greet me. A few hesitant drops of rain deter us from sitting on the lawns overlooking a swimming pool and we decide to lounge on sofas by the glow of a table lamp in the drawing room, while lunch gets readied.

Lumba began flying in 1969 and joined charter airline Huns Air in 1976. A year later, he met his then colleague and now wife, Ila Jugran.

When I ask him about the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), he says there were no major impediments from the regulatory body or the bureaucracy for the best part of his career. “Anyone in the DGCA at that point had entered aviation in the lower rungs like us and we grew up together. 

We had mutual respect. It changed when the IAS began to take over the DGCA and subsequently they brought in the babu mentality,” he tells me.

As apparent in the book, Lumba wasn’t shy of run-ins with authority and called a spade a spade.

With the rapid growth of the aviation industry after the sector opened up to private players in the 1990s, the DGCA couldn’t keep pace and scale up but continued to function like any bureaucratic office, he says. “They have started decentralising but they also fell afoul of international regulations (the US Federal Aviation Administration, or FAA, downgraded the DGCA in 2014) since the main focus of a regulator, which is exercising oversight, was suffering.”

Secondly, he cites that uniform regulations — be it for air taxi operators, jetliners or for cargo carriers — as a problem and identifies the need to evolve graded guidelines.

Further, he recommends a professional body to guide the DGCA and make the latter independent. “It’s become an arm of the ministry (of civil aviation), which is not a very healthy situation. That’s how Air India was being regulated till now,” he says, adding that with the handover of the national carrier to 

the Tata Group, the government will be able to take a bird’s eye view of it rather than a biased one. He has been critical of the merger of Indian Airlines and Air India, which he writes about in his book, too. “How do you integrate two different management systems?” he says.

He points out that India was a signatory to the Warsaw Convention of 1944, according to which the contracting states had to adopt the standards and recommendatory practices, or SARPs, as laid down by the International Civil Aviation Organization on which regulations are based.

In a chapter of his book on leading a pilots’ strike in 1992, he writes, “…India’s compliance was as good as non-existent. It was incumbent on the airline to insist on the airport authority and the DGCA to fulfil their statutory obligation. Accidents/incidents were routinely attributed to ‘pilot error’, a convenient escape route for the people in power.”

He reiterates this when he tells me that India doesn’t follow the practices fully. “It causes unsafe things. Runways are not compliant. Investigations take place and issues crop up. If the DGCA is autonomous and not just a statutory body, we will become a mature aviation country. And it needs to be headed by a technical expert, not a babu,” he says.

We’ve chatted for over half an hour when we carry the conversation to the dining table close to 2 pm. There’s rice, cauliflower-potato bhaji lightly tempered with spices, stuffed eggplants, dal cooked with spinach, mutton kofta and a mix of pickles that have done justice to home-grown produce such as water chestnut, turnip, cauliflower and raw mango. The fresh ingredients, which include ghee that I am proffered to drizzle over rice and crispy plain parathas, and delectable preparations demand more attention and less talk.

Life in the village is a far cry from the heady days as a pilot. Lumba now oversees a labour force of farmers every morning. Besides, the property has farm stays, a venture in partnership with the Haryana government, which his son manages. It also has two non-governmental organisations, a women’s self-help group and an education society that his wife runs.

He doesn’t regret leaving the corporate world and has written in a colourful, plain-spoken manner of his last brush with Indigo in 2017, when a job offer from the airline didn’t materialise. His book presents an account that rubbishes reports of him rejecting the offer on health grounds.

Looking back, he feels fortunate to have had a range of experiences — starting with learning various roles at Huns Air and understanding how departments and regulators work, to joining the Indian Commercial Pilots’ Association (ICPA), compiling an airlines operations manual to man management at Alliance Air as executive director, and helping start IndiGo as vice-president-Operations.

The 1988 crash of an Indian Airlines Boeing 737-200 in Ahmedabad — which killed over 130 people and to which he devotes a chapter in the book — was an episode that taught him much about flight requirements. ICPA, which he represented along with two others, was able to bring to the judiciary's attention “the deficiency that existed and consequent finding and conclusion”, while “the standing counsel for Indian Airlines, DGCA and National Airport Authority led the charge against the pilots, pointing out that it was a clear case of pilot error...,” he writes. 

As I finish eating, he offers fruit custard, a fit dessert that I quickly relish. But he isn’t done. A selection of sweets appears soon. I pick a barfi.

Unlike what I had, there are no free lunches in aviation. Lumba believes in cost control as an abiding philosophy and not mere strategy for airlines.

Before leaving, I ask him about the future of an industry battered by Covid-19. Sooner or later consolidation has to happen, he replies. What the country needs is three rock-solid low-cost carriers and two full-service carriers that handle some sectors but concentrate on the international market. “The problem with Kingfisher and Jet Airways (set to relaunch in 2022) was that they were full-service carriers with full-service costs. But if you are competing in fares with lost-cost carriers, you are bound to lose money. It’s not rocket science.”