“There was a big fight,” recalls Shuchita Srivastava. “Passengers were not getting off the plane, they would not let the door close. The passengers insisted they had valid boarding cards and it was the airline’s problem to give them seats. One lady entered the cockpit with her child and said, ‘I am going to sit here if you don’t take me to Mumbai’.”Mint reports that a SpiceJet flight allegedly took to the skies with more people on board than permitted. Apparently, 15 passengers were asked to get off the plane after the scheduled 212-seater aircraft was switched for a 189-seater. This obviously angered the passengers and they declined to deplane. "The airline then asked that the children sit on the laps of adults they were travelling with" in order to accommodate all passengers.
If the incident did take place as described, it is indeed a cause for grave concern. In a situation like this, what should an airline do? Definitely NOT compromise safety guidelines, no matter how much the pressure from passengers. It's obvious that passengers would get agitated when they are asked to deplane after they have boarded the plane with valid boarding passes.
The first right thing to do is to apologise in a situation like this. An apology is the least that a service-provider owes when a goof-up happens. Then the airline could've explained why they couldn't fly with everybody on board and then could've requested some passengers to move to another flight with an offer: whoever volunteered to move to another flight would be flown free or given a free-flight voucher.
It would have cost the airline less than a lac of rupees in opportunity cost, to fly fifteen people from Delhi to Mumbai and would have solved the crisis, without putting lives at risk and without leaving too much bad taste in the mouth.
Communicating the right things at the right time, especially in times of crisis, can save not just faces, but lives too.
