Special report
The National Carrier is unraveling.
Staff report to work under conditions of sustained anxiety, with no clarity on job security and no visible leadership setting direction from the top. Decisions that require days are taking weeks. Management sources describe an organisation running on institutional memory alone, its senior leadership absent in any meaningful sense.
The board and Chairman are expected to be replaced by the government. That process has stalled. Identifying credible, conflict-free candidates willing to inherit an airline facing an additional fuel burden of 20 to 22 million dollars from April has proven harder than officials publicly acknowledge. Every week the transition is delayed, the National Carrier operates without legitimate authority at the top.
The allegations against the outgoing Chairman are serious.
Management sources describe a pattern in which directors connected to The Corporate repeatedly suppressed India route expansion, characterising viable frequencies as loss-making. During the same period, Air India expanded services into Sri Lanka. The Corporate’s aviation arm is Air India’s General Sales Agency in Sri Lanka. It sold those seats. It earned those commissions.
Between 2019 and today, the National Carrier lost more than 50 weekly flights to India. IndiGo and Air India filled the vacuum.
The carrier that once made history as the first foreign airline to operate 100 weekly flights to India has been systematically retreating from its most important market.
Whether boardroom interference caused that retreat is a question requiring formal investigation. What is beyond dispute is that a structural conflict of interest operated unchallenged at the highest level of a public institution.
Allegations circulating in industry and government circles go further, suggesting that commercially sensitive information regarding route strategy and pricing reached competitors. If substantiated, the legal exposure extends well beyond conflict of interest.
CIABOC has the mandate. The Anti-Corruption Act has the provisions. Neither has moved.
The human cost is accumulating quietly.
Experienced personnel are exploring options outside the airline. Institutional knowledge built over decades is walking out. An airline can absorb fuel shocks and bad quarters. It cannot easily recover from the collapse of internal confidence.
The government’s failure to reconstitute the board swiftly is itself a governance failure. Appointing a conflicted Chairman was the first mistake. Allowing him to remain while allegations mounted was the second.
Presiding over weeks of indecision while the airline deteriorates is the third.
Each mistake compounds the last.
The National Carrier needs a board with one loyalty only, to the airline and to the public underwriting its debt. What it has now is a vacuum. And vacuums, in aviation as in politics, are never empty for long.