Flying whose flag?

At ground level, the IAF signing an MoU with Air India about releasing senior military pilots for civilian flying jobs makes perfect sense. IAF, also a good training hub, has experienced high-skilled personnel it can spare; and AI is facing a potentially service-subverting shortage of pilots. The country’s air force helping the national career — what could be nobler, some might say. Admirers of this deal should look at it from above. From that vantage point, one thing becomes clear. AI may carry the grand description of a national career but the really grand thing about civil aviation now is multiple service providers. If IAF has trained pilots to spare, if senior IAF officers are willing to take civilian jobs as a preparation for premature retirement, why should they be only released for AI? This is not a government organisation to government organisation deal that is no one else’s business. That kind of defence could have been mounted when flying civilians was a sarkari monopoly. Now that civil aviation is an exuberantly competitive sector, the IAF-AI arrangement has a terrible licence-permit raj feel to it.

If the IAF brass is not inclined to consider the possibility that its pilots can be deputed to the private sector as well, it must be questioned about its disinclination. What is so unacceptable about defence personnel going on deputations to the private sector? What is so unacceptable about the private sector anyway? Hundreds of retired defence officers serve in the private sector, many in positions of great seniority. If the IAF is going to base the list of pilots to be released on candidates’ willingness to take premature retirement, what is lost in allowing private airlines into the arrangement?

There’s no logical answer the IAF can give to any of these questions. And that points to a sad fact: the prejudice against the private sector runs strong and deep in some official thinking. So the obvious needs restating: to fly or not fly AI is not an index of patriotism.