Sometime in the wee hours of the night as you sleep tonight, a plane in white and aubergine livery, coming in from Mumbai, will land at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport, its passengers and crew will disembark, and it will be towed away silently in the dead of the night into a parking slot.
It will be the end of a jubilant, if short-lived, chapter in India’s domestic aviation history.
Vistara is dead. Long live Vistara.
Why is there so much of tribute and accolades being showered on socials, as well as in office canteens and water cooler chats, over an airline Indians just about knew for one short decade?
It’s not as if airlines have not disappeared from our horizons before — from the much-storied Jet Airways down to the very ‘sexy’ Kingfisher with all its paraphernalia, India’s commercial aviation space is a veritable junkyard for airline companies who dreamed of the skies but couldn’t handle the turbulence from the ground up. From Air Deccan to East West Airlines, to even Go West last summer, it is littered with Icarian tales aplenty.
Then what was so special about Vistara?
It is perhaps the realisation amongst many of us that it is the last taste most of us will likely get of the old-world joy of flying within India, the way it was meant to be by those magnificent men in their flying machines back in the origin days of commercial flying in the west? Slick, smiling crew members in classily decorated cabins, a tray laden with a piping, hot meal, followed by some coffee or tea, and add-ons ranging from a warm blanket to the day’s newspapers, in most cases.
Of course, most Indians don’t even know, let alone have experienced, the glamour of flying in its original days — from unlimited champagne, caviar and choicest cigars (before smoking was prohibited) to some Pan Am flights even having a piano on board!
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Forget Western excess, even for Indians who were happy and satisfied with hot meals and a comfortable seat with enough legroom that won’t induce thrombosis, a full-service flight experience is increasingly something of a nostalgic tale to pass down to the young generation.
And nostalgia will be where it will likely reside, as budget airlines take over the world, with the focus being ‘on time’ at the lowest rate possible and getting people from point A to point B. And the whole ‘if you want it, you pay for it!’ Philosophy.
The CEO of Ryan Air, the global poster boy of low-cost flying, was once infamously quoted saying that if possible, he would like to have passengers standing, with extra charges in case they would like to use a seat!
Budget airlines are the future, and in a particularly cost-conscious market like India that has taken to Indigo and its philosophy of spartan efficiency, Vistara then becomes the last vestige of a flying experience from a bygone era. After all, not everyone can fork out business or first-class charges, say, on an Emirates or Singapore Airlines, to experience that feeling all the time.
With Vistara subsumed into Air India, the nation will be left with just the legacy carrier as the only full-service airline in the country. Besides the fact that this will give Tatas the flexibility to determine pricing, it will also ensure that domestic flying will switch firmly into a budget flying default.
Market leader Indigo is bracing up to protect its turf, while Air India, by all indications, is set to take it on with its own budget model, Air India Express. The only other pan-Indian airlines are SpiceJet and Akasa, which both follow the low-cost model.
The paean being sung for Vistara is also ironically a testament to the utter lack of confidence Indian flyers seem to be having in Air India getting its act together. Nearly three years after the takeover by Tatas, Air India’s quality seems to have only gone for bad to worse.
While mandarins at Air India’s headquarters in Gurugram are apparently hoping that inducting Vistara and its crew with their high service quality could improve Air India’s reputation, the reverse is also a frightening possibility. One only has to hark back to the chaotic days of domestic leader Indian Airlines and its disastrous merger into the white elephant that was Air India back in the late 2000s. Let’s just hope history doesn’t repeat itself.
