IA earns most hijacked tag

IA earns most hijacked tag
SWATI CHATURVEDI

NEW DELHI, JANUARY 4: Indian Airlines may soon be required to carry a statutory warning on its tickets -- "The airline with the most hijackings in the world". The latest incident which ended at Kandahar was the 15th since IA's inception.

IA's dubious distinction came to light recently when the Secretary, Civil Aviation, Ravindra Gupta, being part of the Crisis Management Group (CMG), asked IA to compile a comparative list of international hijackings.

This exercise brought to light the fact that IA flights had been hijacked the maximum number of times. International airlines, such as Lufthansa, have had one or two hijacks till date.

Despite this dubious track record, IA has never taken any action against any of its personnel. There has been no dearth of inquiries though. Even in the case of IC 814, the Kathmandu-Delhi flight that was hijacked, the IA employees who issued boarding passes to the five hijackers despite the obvious discrepancies in the flight manifest are yet to be questioned. According tosources, the staff on duty on December 24 -- the day of the hijack -- has not been recalled to Delhi.

While the official IA spokesman refused to comment, a senior IA official passed the buck: "We may be number one in terms of hijackings but that's hardly our fault. The problem lies with the terrible security provisions made by the Government on the ground." The airlines officials say that nowhere in the world is any airline responsible for ground security. They say they have already told the Ministry for Civil Aviation that even in the previous cases the hijackings had occurred due to security lapses on the ground for which the state police was responsible.

According to the information made available to the CMG, Lahore seems to be most popular with hijackers. IA flights were taken there nine times. One hijacked flight was also taken to Karachi.

The first IA plane was hijacked in 1971. It was a Delhi-Srinagar flight (IC 422). In September 1976, a Delhi-Mumbai flight (IC 491) was commandeered. In 1978,the IC 10 flight between Lucknow and Delhi was hijacked. In 1981 it was the turn of IC 423, connecting Delhi and Srinagar. A year later, in August 1982, IC 425 was hijacked. The same year IC 492 -- flying from Mumbai to Delhi -- was taken over in mid-air. Another Mumbai-Delhi flight (IC 405) was hijacked in July 1984. The next month IC 21 was seized.

Their was a lull for a couple of years and the next hijacking occurred in September 1990 on IC 534, flying between Coimbatore and Bangalore. In January 1993, IC 810, flying between Calcutta and Delhi, was hijacked. In April that year IC 436, connecting Lucknow and Delhi, and another flight between Delhi and Srinagar were hijacked. Then came the hijacking of a Delhi-Chennai flight, IC 439. In January 1994, an IA flight between Bangalore and Chennai was hijacked.