Lalu Prasad Yadav and Nitish Kumar – the former an ex-chief minister of Bihar and the latter the incumbent at the time of writing this and often staunch rivals – were travelling together on a Delhi-Patna IndiGo flight sometime in 2010.

While Nitish Kumar had fastened his seatbelt, Yadav, in his trademark white kurta-pyjama, was not willing to fasten the seatbelt.

The airline crew told the flight was about to take off shortly but he paid no heed.

Eventually one of them decided to bell the cat. “Sir aap seat belt laga lijiye … aap se chaar bar bol chukke hain hum,” recalls Manu Rana who was with IndiGo for a decade, first as flight crew and then as a crew auditor who kept standing there looking at him. “Aap ko strictly bol rahi hun. Aapki safety ke liye bol rahi hun. Please laga lijiye.”

Lalu Prasad Yadav, a VIP, realised that Rana will not budge now till he fastened the seat belt. One of India’s colourful and headstrong politicians had to yield and enable the flight to take off.

A few months later, on a Mumbai-Delhi flight, a person asked for a bottle of water from a young stewardess. After supplying the bottle, she asked for the payment of Rs 40. He claimed his bag was in the overhead bin and assured her that he would pay later. She went to him half an hour later and requested the money. The passenger again asked her to come later.

When the captain announced the landing, she again went to him. Instead of paying up, the passenger got angry and started to vituperate, “I know what kind of families you girls come from, I know your background.”

The stewardess was humiliated. She started to weep. She realised all eyes were on her. In a low tone, she first said thank you for the money and apologised if she had done something wrong.

And then said, “But Sir, my father is a retired colonel from the Indian Army, my brother is a senior inspector in UP Police and I have done law. So, I hope you know my background.”

The passengers around her started to applaud her.

While alighting from the aircraft, the same passenger walked up to her and apologised.

The life of the airline crew is not as easy or glamorous as it appears to those looking in, especially in an LCC such as IndiGo where efficiency is critical for profits. One has to handle not only VIPs but will encounter passengers with prejudices and preconceived notions and many first-time travellers.

It begins when you click on IndiGo’s career page to apply for the position of cabin crew and, effectively, the face of the airline.

Over the years, IndiGo has become India’s cabin crew training assembly line. The airline has around 10,000 crew members for its fleet of over 350 planes. It hires around 500 cabin crew every month to sustain its ever-expanding operation. The requirement also covers attrition – around 150 crew, mostly the crème de la crème, leave the airline every month. They are absorbed by not only local airlines but also Qatar Airways, Etihad Airways, Emirates Airlines etc., as they offer better pay, perks and lifestyle. Since 2022, Air India, now privatised and under the Tata Group, has become the latest magnet for many of these crew members.

Attrition at such nightmarish levels has led IndiGo to start a new training facility called iFly in Gurugram, which is now being expanded even further. It churns out trained cabin crew by the hundreds; a far cry from the era when cabin crew were selected by Bollywood superstars such as Sharmila Tagore and Jaya Bachchan for Air India.

IndiGo’s selection process is a hard grind. It has three rounds and the focus of the airline is to ensure it selects candidates who can be moulded to its needs and not necessarily someone who looks pretty. Once selected, the airline provides them with a free fifteen-day stay in Gurugram after which they need to take up their own accommodation for the three-month-long training. Free pick-up and drop-off are provided all through.

The three months are nothing less than a military boot camp for many of the candidates. “It is so intense I almost thought of quitting it,” said Antara (name changed on request), one of the cabin crew who passed out in late 2023.

Why did she think of quitting?

Among the many reasons, the main one was the modules that had to do with customer handling. In this module, the airline trainers can get really rough with the crew presenting themselves as angry customers (why is my pre-booked meal not here?) and test how the crew react and their patience levels.

“Girls did not cry, but they panicked, really panicked,” Antara said.

In early 2023, a video went viral in which a passenger could be heard shouting at an IndiGo stewardess and was heard saying that she was a servant to which the crew retorted with “I am an employee, but I am not your servant.”

Undoubtedly, the passenger was obnoxious. Many supported the crew and hailed her on social media. But a few others said that the crew is trained to handle, precisely, such situations and should not become “hysterical” the way the stewardess in the video had done, as one crew Tina (name changed) put it.

“Even if the passenger was nasty, there are so many policies that support you. IndiGo has such open and supportive policies that they would have supported her and filed an FIR the moment they landed,” Tina said. “How hysterical had she become; she could have slapped that passenger if the other crew had not taken her away.”

It was possible, said Tina, who has handled such situations herself at IndiGo, that the passenger was having a bad day. The stewardess perhaps should have tried to explain to him the problem. If the passenger was still not amenable, then the next step was to apologise and give him something close to his expectations. If he would not still calm down, she should have given him the feedback form and the IndiGo customer complaints email address to send it to.

I did check with people at IndiGo on what happened after the I-am-not-your-servant episode. I was told that the crew member was extended the required support. However, she was also sent for an anger management module later because, while the airline would defend her and itself publicly, it did not want a repetition of the episode and make it an example that other crew members follow. An IndiGo spokesperson confirmed, “the concerned crew member was provided professional support and counselling” and “rostered back on active duty a few days thereafter”.

The drill to instil discipline in the young crew members – who may be fresh out of high school or college – starts from the time they join iFly. Some perhaps find it extreme.

Excerpted with permission from Sky High: The Untold Story of IndiGo, Tarun Shukla, HarperCollins India.