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CROSSTALK

Submarine in the sky
ONE must say that at long last Bangladesh Biman is fulfilling its brand promise. When it
spreads its wings, in the literal sense it's your home in the sky. Everything that happens on the ground gets airborne and travels with you. Corruption, sloppiness, inefficiency and partisan bickering are aviation fuel to an airline gone way out of line. Every time it flies is a miracle. The pilots still know how to fly the planes, and the air hostesses still smile at you. The aircrafts take off if they land and land if they take off, subject to the subjunctive that they fly at all. Sorry to say, our national flag carrier is a compulsive joke. Two weeks ago, Biman passengers were stranded in Muscat airport for the outlandish reason that its leased aircraft went AWOL over an agreement row. In lune, four Indonesian pilots hired by the airline were flying F28s without visa, work permit and license from the civil aviation. Our national airline is hopping on wobbly crutches of borrowed planes and borrowed pilots.
The end result is a state of near paralysis. Biman has cancelled all its domestic flights until November 29. It has also cancelled its flights on three international routes and reduced the number of flights on five others. When going gets tough, tough gets going. The airline is cutting corners to run hajj flights.
It didn't have to be like this though. Only last October Biman received a new Boeing aircraft, which was endearingly named Palki by the prime minister. That was the first of the ten aircrafts Bangladesh Biman is going to receive between 2011 and 2019 under a $1.2 billion sales agreement with the world's leading aircraft manufacturer Boeing. The airline also announced that it was going to hire 14 foreign pilots to fly its new aircrafts and train local pilots.
Let me tell you what went wrong.
A frog once asked a centipede which leg it put forward first when it started to walk. Every time the centipede tried to figure it out, the legs got tangled and it stumbled to the ground. It's the same thing that must have thrown Biman into chaos. We asked it to become profitable, and got it confused. In its unhabitual attempt to make some money from the hajj flights, the airline almost got itself crippled.
That makes us curious as to how the people who run Biman run their homes. There is no housekeeping,
no budgeting and no planning ahead of time. How do they do their projections? How do they work out their algorithm for profit? How do they pick routes, schedule flights, devise promotions, prioritise strategies, control costs and calculate revenues?
These questions are relevant because foreign airlines operating in Bangladesh are minting money. These airlines have increased their number of flights, grown market share and brought in bigger aircrafts for capacity handling. Does the
Biman management ever wonder how others enjoy so much sunshine in the same sky, which looks cloudy for them?
Perhaps they don't. Busy with recipe, they forget cooking. They are procuring new aircrafts, hiring new pilots and tackling the irate employees, but don't have time to focus on the real stuff, their business objectives. That's one thing they need to decide first. Should Biman be treated like a business? Or, should it be a picnic at taxpayers' expense?
May be, Biman is only a piece of
the puzzle that pervades this country. Its hopeless condition persists like viral genome in a dormant infection. If the government is contentious, politicians are obnoxious, banks are porous, bureaucrats are pretentious, businessmen are devious, law enforcers are notorious, advisers are dubious and intellectuals are spurious, why should Biman bother to be precious?
Do we need to have a national airline? If our prime minister travels in a foreign airline on her state visits, our nationals get stranded in foreign airports, and our workers risk job terminations abroad because they can't fly on time, what's the glory of having a notional carrier that is always counting losses?
There are 196 countries in the world, out of which 143 owns national flag carriers. Out of them only 37 are fully state-owned, and 38 are partially state-owned. Some of the major airlines of the world such as Qantas and British Airways have been divested to the private sector. Even Air India is under that consideration since its market share slipped to fourth place after Jet Airways, Kingfisher and Indigo.
Bangladesh Biman is certainly in the wrong business. If you think airline, it thinks submarine. It has been sinking on purpose, because submarines need constant depth. One can argue which between the flag carrier and the nation is dragging the other down.
The writer is Editor, First News and an opinion writer for The Daily Star.
Email: badrull51@yahoo.com