Tata Group Chairperson N Chandrasekaran on Sunday said that Air India should have responded in a more swift manner to the incident of a man urinating on a female passenger on a flight from New York to Delhi in November.
“The incident on Air India flight AI 102 on November 26, 2022, has been a matter of personal anguish to me and my colleagues at Air India,” Chandrasekaran said in a statement. “Air India’s response should have been much swifter. We fell short of addressing this situation the way it should have been.”
According to the first information report filed by the Delhi Police, the man on the New York to Delhi flight walked to the woman’s seat in the business class section in a drunken state, unzipped his pants and urinated on her.
The FIR stated that after the incident, the Air India crew brought the accused person, identified as Shankar Mishra, to the woman’s seat and forced her to negotiate with him. The woman in a letter to Tata Group Chairperson Natarajan Chandrasekaran accused the crew of being “deeply unprofessional” while dealing with a “very traumatic situation”.
In his Sunday statement, Chandrasekaran said that Tata group and Air India stand by the safety and well-being of their passengers with full conviction.
“We will review and repair every process to prevent or address any incidents of such unruly nature,” he said.
Chandrasekaran’s statement comes a day after the airline’s chief executive officer and managing director Campbell Wilson acknowledged that Air India could have handled the case better, both in the air and on the ground.
He also said that Air India has issued show cause notices and de-rostered one pilot as well as four cabin crew.
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