It was Sunday night and two Supreme Court judges had a long list of cases listed for the next morning.
They decided to sit apart and use the three-hour flight from Tamil Nadu’s Coimbatore to New Delhi to prepare for the hearings on their iPads.
At the time of boarding, it seemed like just another flight. But it was far from.
Justice K.V. Viswanathan narrated in the Supreme Court on Tuesday, while hearing a petition that sought tough guidelines to tackle unruly fliers, that the Sept 15 flight he took with fellow judge Surya Kant soon turned into a nightmare due to two drunk male passengers.
According to NDTV, the judges were seated in the front row, close to the toilet.
About 30 minutes into the flight, some passengers started complaining about a male who had been in the toilet for a long while and was not responding to knocks on the door.
Around the time, another male flier walked towards the toilet, and puked into an air sickness bag.
The sight left the passengers, including the two senior judges, unsettled.
The all-female flight crew repeatedly knocked on the toilet’s door, but there was no response. Though they had a master key, they were hesitant to use it as they were unaware of the male passenger’s condition.
They requested another male flier to open the door, and he found the passenger drunk and asleep inside the lavatory. He was helped out of the washroom and taken back to his seat.
The judges learnt that the other passenger, who threw up near the washroom, was also drunk.
Coincidently, the petition seeking “standard operating procedures” to deal with unruly fliers, filed by an elderly woman who was allegedly urinated on during an Air India flight, came up before Justice Viswanathan on Tuesday.
Shankar Mishra was accused of urinating on the woman on an Air India flight from New York to Delhi on Nov 26, 2022.
The woman filed the petition in March 2023 saying that Air India failed to treat her with care and responsibility after the unpleasant experience.
The woman referred to seven instances of passenger misconduct on flights between 2014 and 2023, alleging they were not dealt with properly by the airline concerned.
During the hearing, Justice Viswanathan said “something creative” must be done to address the issue: “Maybe strategic seating or something.”
He and Justice B.R. Gavai, who adjourned the case by eight weeks, asked the Central government’s counsel, Additional Solicitor-General Aiswarya Bhati, to instruct the authorities concerned to examine and modify guidelines regarding unruly fliers in line with global practices.
