'Mismanagement' of Air India - possible election issue?

Here is another story chronicling the awful state of affairs at Air India. Calling some of these details shocking would be a massive understatement.

When Bob Haygooni paid a midflight visit to a cockpit at his new employer, Air India, he was shocked. The pilots, he said, had completely covered the windows with newspaper to keep out the sun.

“All you had in the cockpit was this yellowish glow, as the light permeated the newspaper,” Mr. Haygooni recalled, saying it was a visibility hazard he had never seen before in 30 years of flying.

But “this was a normal thing at Air India,” said Mr. Haygooni, a former United Airlines pilot who flew for the Indian airline for 16 months. In April 2010, however, he decided that the paycheck was not worth his concerns over what he considered the government’s haphazard approach to running its state-owned airline.

One safety concern noted by the interviewed pilots was that veteran Air India captains often left cockpit doors unlocked — a practice most carriers around the world abandoned after the 9/11 attacks in the United States. They also said captains tended to leave the cabin during flights, leaving co-pilots alone for long periods. They said pilots’ smoking in cockpits was also common.

The money being lost every year alone, which is in excess of a billion dollars could be put to use to solve many of the aviation bottlenecks in the country. To put this money in perspective, the total cost of building greenfield airports in Hyderabad and Bangalore from scratch are said to have been $600 Million each.

It is anybody's guess if this is a result of incompetence or willful sabotage. In either case, this should be a huge stick for the opposition parties to beat the government with. It is time the UPA and it's allies get a lot more heat for Air India's mismanagement in the coming elections.