Can there be a more perverse demonstration of administrative apathy than the fact that aircraft carrying Indian VVIPs are technologically challenged? The common and empirically tested wisdom is that whatever may be going wrong with services for the aam aadmi, the khaas aadmi doesn’t have to worry; the state lays out the best for the latter. Evidence to the contrary is now widely circulating thanks to air traffic control’s ‘procedural lapse’ over the IAF special plane ferrying Sonia Gandhi. IAF’s specially managed squad of Boeing 737s for VVIP domestic flights lacks a feature — the ability to fly safely at reduced vertical distance between two aircraft — commonplace in passenger aircraft everywhere. It is instructive to note that the sarkari solution to VVIP aircraft lacking the feature has been to instruct air traffic control to remember the planes’ ‘special status’. This is so old economy.

RVSM, reduced vertical separation minima, was introduced globally to maintain safety standards in the face of air traffic congestion. India was late in adopting RVSM. But when it did, about four years back, it had started experiencing the first stages of an air travel boom. Air traffic congestion was becoming an incipient reality. The days of a few Indian Airlines planes mostly carrying government officials around were already history. Since then low-cost carriers and general competition-related pressure on ticket prices have changed the profile of civil aviation in India. But as the sky got crowded with the aam aadmi flying like never before, it was still thought that according ‘special status’ to VVIP planes would be enough. Naturally, a clause was introduced to make an exception for VVIP aircraft. Clauses, however, can’t always hold back progress. VVIP arrangements have to keep pace with citizens’ economic empowerment, this is a basic lesson from a fast-growing democracy. It is about time the IAF and everyone else concerned with VVIP travel learnt it.

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