Why is Airbus not declaring an emergency over Indigo-Gate?

Kolkata: The media airways are now thriving on the Indigo-Gate fiasco, where a passenger, BJP MP Tejasvi Surya, 'accidentally' opened the emergency exit during routine boarding. Everyone seems rushed to crashland the investigation and the reasons are charmingly politically correct.

My larger anguish is on the silence exercised by the manufacturer, fly-by-wire Airbus Industrie, whose credibility is potentially being endangered. The reporting of the incident suggests that the painstakingly calibrated contingency conduit can be unravelled by simple human error, as opposed to definitive intent. This is counterintuitive to design protocols and is seemingly a threat to the industry at large, as mid-air scenarios would be irreversible.

But then, Indigo is a marquee customer of the Toulouse giant, recently losing out to the 737 Max for the Air India contract. That is why they will remain sotto voice, in spite of the airline being rather casual about the causation. Inarguably there is too much to lose if the behemoth gets pissed off, and there is also the passenger affiliation to carefully consider.

A larger debate that does emerge is how brand reputations often bear the brunt of poor customer conduct, although the complicity cannot be firmly established. When Cyrus Mistry passed away in a Mercedes crash, the German giant does come to light in a negative light, even if the fault resides with both the driver and infrastructure. When the Nepalese Royal family got wiped out by a dilettante prince, the whisky brand called Famous Grouse earned disrepute as a palpable cause.

Brand Nepal at large gets tarnished each time a poorly equipped airline has a catastrophe while the Himalayas are truly not to blame. Every time a tech geek chooses a voluntary passage to the ages, the Apple Mac is often viewed as a collateral provocation. When a celebrity with a much-abused ecosystem perishes in a corporate facility, the brand is undeniably affected. This is actually an inadvertent Domino effect and one that often falsely, implicates an unsuspecting associate.

Arguably, brands cannot do much about it and just as Issey Miyake gained phenomenally from the Steve Jobs association, others may have to suffer as well. Rishi Kapoor, the actor, was a voracious customer of Black Label whisky while Shahrukh Khan, reportedly, is landlocked to an ITC cigarette trademark. When the performer works, the brand gains and when a connection can be established with an unfavourable outcome, the excesses of the user can be easily underwhelmed.

On the Indigo matter, manfully succeeding the Air India episode, the lack of seriousness is rather depressing. Flying is now a societal necessity and an adhesive for civilization, where emergency processes act as reassuring gravitas. When a market-leading brand in an industry-leading nation places exceptional weightage on an apology, the precipitation of the storm clouds gets thwarted. This is no minor matter and does merit major censure.

In a hyper-imaginative universe, I can well anticipate the entitled bravado of brash Indian flyers, wishing to replicate the verbal instructions of the air hostess in flesh and blood sincerity. That is possibly why the door was efficiently unfurled, while the windows thankfully could not be penetrated.