The story of IndiGo airlines was long overdue and the author has scripted a book just the way a hard-nosed reporter would. He has utilised the vast experience he has gathered from his civil aviation beat to give us what can be called a detailed ‘report’, probably a shade beyond a ‘book’. Innumerable interviews add value to every argument presented.
This is a fact-based ‘report’, though the author did not always have his ducks in-a-row – and the presence of a chapter called Cabin Crew does not add much meat to the narrative – yet the lucid prose does not get in the way of robbing you of attention. may not read like the autobiography of Lee Iacocca or Kishore Biyani’s , but it surely wasn’t meant to be. This is a book for information junkies.
We could have done with some better editing, though. The planning and germination stage of a business is always interesting. IndiGo was promoted on the lines of some foreign low cost carriers (LCC), and the fact that Air Deccan had experimented with an LCC in India pretty successfully, added to the promoters’ confidence.
Deccan’s founder Capt. G.R.
Gopinath has written a morale-boosting foreword to this book. Shukla takes us through the back-routes that airline promoters have to go through to get even a single aircraft in the air in India. While an LCC was an obvious choice, the level of micromanagement needed to keep it afloat in an overtly price sensitive market is a gripping story.
If you sit back and think, the .