How else do you explain the fact that the airline's latest exercise in purchasing aircraft is based on a constantly shrinking market share? At a time when its competitors are flying bigger planes in and out of India, and in other markets, Air India is planning to buy smaller capacity planes. And since the laws of economics apply in the airlines business as well, larger capacity planes mean that the unit cost of carrying a passenger is around 25 to 30 percent cheaper than that for Air India with itssmaller planes.

It is, of course, precisely for this reason that when Air India's management presented its report to its board earlier this week, on purchasing of 150-seater and 250-seater aircraft from either Boeing or Airbus, the board sent it packing, asking it to do some homework first. Why do you now want a 250-seater aircraft for the European sector, the board asked, when till just recently you wanted to buy a larger 300-seater aircraft, popularly referred to as the Medium Capacity Long Range (MCLR)?

Air India first began talking of purchasing the MCLR around 5 years ago, after extensive studies of passenger traffic, and even had three reports to evaluate the Boeing and Airbus planes -- Boeing was put ahead by the first committee, Airbus by the second after some dextrous manoeuvring, and this was rejected by the third committee which plumped for Boeing again. So please, the board members asked politely, explain what change has taken place in the market forecasts or other parameters, to justify thischanged demand. In the event, the board asked Air India to study the viability of bigger aircraft as well, including the MCLR option.

Not surprisingly, Air India's management had no convincing answer. The conventional answer given was: sure, it's true that competitors such as Lufthansa manage to fill up their 400-seater aircraft even though they have upto three flights a day in and out of India, but this is something that Air India is not confident of doing. At best Air India can get around 200-225 passengers from one destination -- Delhi or Mumbai -- so it makes more sense to buy the 250-seater and fly it at near-full capacity, rather than to buy a 300-seater and fly it at a lower capacity. While that may be true today, since an aircraft has a life of around 15 years, this means Air India's management is not looking at augmenting traffic over much of this period.

But, if the airline is looking at just maintaining the absolute volume of traffic in a growing market, why be there at all? Isn't it better forit to get into `code-sharing', or allowing other airlines to increase flights into and out of India at the expense of Air India's quota, and then shaing some of this increased revenue? That, in fact, is what Air India has been doing of late, when stopping its flights to Frankfurt, Paris, Geneva and Rome.

Air India's strategy gets even more bizarre, and suicidal. While attempting to justify the smaller planes, it is trying to squeeze in more seats into the same configuration. Now, the only way to do this is to reduce the number of first class and business class seats. So, at a time when its competitors like Thai Airways or Cathay Pacific have around 60 business class seats for long flights, Air India told Boeing and Airbus it wanted just around 20 business class seats. In other words, Air India has decided that it wants to cater to essentially ethnic traffic, and that too primarily economy class.

That at a time when the world over airlines make their real money on business and first class. And on even thislimited business class it offers, Air India wants to ensure that it isn't as good as the competition's. So, while Delta Airlines' business class seats have a `pitch' (that is the extent to which the seats stretch when pushed backwards) of 60 inches, Air India's latest specifications state it wants a pitch of just 48 inches.

Nor are these the only instances of the casual approach of Air India's management. Apart from the confusion over the MCLR, in May, for instance, it asked Boeing and Airbus to give presentations on even a medium-capacity-medium-range (MCMR) aircraft -- a 300-seater which could fly 2,500 km, essentially the Gulf route. By June, it had dropped the MCMR! Worse, it appears the airline's technical committee had signed its evaluation report even before Boeing made its presentation at the end of June, and the ground rules or the aircraft configuration were finalised well after Airbus had made its presentation!

Given this casual attitude, and the fact that the disinvestment commission hasrecommended that a strategic investor be brought into the chronically mismanaged Air India as early as possible, surely it makes more sense to bring in this investor before the airline commits a major blunder by purchasing the wrong aircraft. The way it did a decade ago, when it bought the Airbus A-310 despite the Tata committee recommending the Boeing 767 -- the 310 cannot fly non-stop to Europe and is today used only for shorter hauls. Unless, of course, the idea behind the current exercise is just to buy aircraft, and not really bothering about what happens to the airline.