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A “no-frills” airline for
the North-East
This is your Captain speaking and welcome aboard the inaugural flight of the new public sector Tughlaq Airlines. As you perhaps know this is a no-frills airline which means we’ve dispensed with all non-essentials like engines, wings and fuselage.
I don’t have any navigation aids in the cockpit and I shall be much obliged if one of you passengers will kindly lend me his pocket transistor FM radio so that I can tune into All India Radio, Aizawl to get my bearing and find out just where in the world I am.
I don’t have a co-pilot with me and I’d appreciate if an able bodied passenger will help me to manually push down the landing gear.
Being a no-frill airline I am duty bound to save on fuel and therefore I’ll be switching off the engines while in flight depending solely on luck and a heart-felt prayer to stay aloft.
In an emergency it might become necessary for all of you to jump out without parachutes. Please open your umbrellas and hop out and best of luck.
Being a no-frill airline, we don’t have fashionable young air hostesses flashing winsome smiles as they serve you gourmet lunches and choice French liquors. Instead a toothless old nanny will trundle down the aisle pushing a wooden cart and you may buy your requirements of sliced raw mangoes and cucumbers garnished with chilly powder. This is the choice cuisine our no-frill airline offers.
We might occasionally hit an air pocket and being a no-frill airline we haven’t provided vomit bags. Please therefore, feel free to throw up on the kurta - pyjamas of your co-passengers.
I regret that passengers in the business class who are all captains of industry and senior executives have to stand. A daily-rated second division clerk in the Civil Aviation Ministry, in a file noting to the minister and the Director General of Civil Aviation, has said that seats are an avoidable frill. Please therefore stand grimly clutching the shoulders of the person standing next to you.
Being a no-frill airline, this plane doesn’t have fuel tanks. I’m carrying the fuel for this flight in stand up, pearlpet pickle jars kept under my seat.
I request passengers standing near the door to be extra careful as it doesn’t have a secure locking arrangement. A temporary peon in the Civil Aviation Ministry, in a memo to the Prime Minister’s office, has ruled that secure door locking arrangements are an unnecessary frill. The door is held together with a little home-made glue and chewing gum.
I thank you for patronising our no-frills airline and I wish you a pleasant flight. We’re great people to go down with!
S. Raghunath
