Crores spent on advertising. Years of building brand equity. Campaigns to outshine rivals.
And then, one queue. One dispute. One employee who reportedly lost control.
Within hours, your brand isn’t associated with your latest campaign. It’s associated with blood on a passenger’s face, a traumatised 7-year-old, and a viral storm you can’t outspend.
This is the new reality of reputation risk.
What Reportedly Happened at Terminal 1
(The following account is based on media reports and the passenger’s posts on X. Official investigations are ongoing.)
December 19, 2025. Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport. Terminal 1.
Passenger Ankit Dewan was reportedly travelling with his family on a SpiceJet flight. His wife. A 7-year-old daughter. A 4-month-old infant in a stroller.
According to media reports, airport staff directed them to use a security lane meant for staff and passengers with reduced mobility. The stroller made regular lanes difficult. (Free Press Journal)
Now pause here. This lane reportedly falls under CISF jurisdiction. A high-security zone. Who authorised a passenger family with a stroller to use a staff queue? What are the SOPs? Who monitors compliance?
In that same queue also was Captain Virender Sejwal, an Air India Express pilot, as per reports. Off-duty. Not in uniform. Reportedly travelling as a passenger on an IndiGo flight to Bengaluru. (Republic World)
So we have a SpiceJet passenger and an Air India Express pilot (reportedly flying IndiGo that day) in a staff lane managed by CISF at a GMR-operated terminal.
Three airlines. One security agency. One airport operator. And nobody with clear ownership of what happens next.
According to Dewan’s account on X, when he objected to alleged queue-cutting, the pilot reportedly asked if he was “anpadh” (uneducated) for being in that lane. (Republic World)
The verbal exchange reportedly escalated. And then, as per the passenger’s account, it turned physical.
Dewan was reportedly left bleeding. He posted images showing blood on his face and, as he claimed, on the pilot’s shirt. “The blood in the photograph on his shirt is also mine,” he wrote. (News9 Live)
His 7-year-old daughter reportedly witnessed everything. Dewan stated she remains “traumatised and scared.” (ETV Bharat)
Here’s where it reportedly gets worse.
Dewan alleges he was pressured to sign a letter stating he would not pursue the matter. The alternative? Miss his flight. Lose Rs 1.2 lakh in holiday bookings. Sacrifice his family’s trip to seek justice. (Free Press Journal)
He asked on X: “Will the CCTV footage disappear in the 2 days till I make it back to Delhi?”
A valid question. CCTV reportedly exists. Hundreds of witnesses were present. Women, children, elderly passengers all around. And yet, as per the passenger’s account, a bleeding man was handed a waiver to sign instead of first aid and a clear path to file a complaint.
According to reports, Dewan’s wife repeatedly requested first aid, which was not immediately provided. (ETV Bharat)
Air India Express has suspended the pilot pending investigation. They issued a statement: “We unequivocally condemn such behaviour. The employee concerned has been removed from official duties with immediate effect.” (Zee News)
Delhi Police stated that no formal complaint has been received yet, and “appropriate legal action will be taken” when one is filed. (ANI)
The investigation will determine individual culpability. But look at the systemic mess already visible.
Who Was Responsible? Everyone. And No One.
This is what happens when accountability is diffused across multiple agencies.
CISF manages the security zone. But did they intervene when voices were reportedly raised? When did it allegedly turn physical? When a man reportedly lay bleeding?
The airline (Air India Express) employs the pilot. But he wasn’t on duty. He wasn’t in uniform. He was reportedly a passenger that day. On another airline’s flight.
The airport operator (GMR/DIAL) designed the queue system. Mixing staff lanes with passengers carrying infants. Creating ambiguity. Ambiguity creates friction. Friction plus ego plus stress equals conflict.
And the pilot himself? An off-duty crew member, reportedly not in uniform, using a staff lane. What’s the sanctity of a “staff queue” if anyone with an airline ID can use it while heading for a personal holiday?
Where does the staff privilege end and the passenger status begin?
Nobody owns this. So nobody prevented it. And a 7-year-old reportedly watched her father bleed.
This Isn’t Just an Aviation Problem
It’s tempting to file this under “another airline mess” and scroll past.
But if you lead any customer-facing operation, this is your problem too.
The same flashpoints exist in retail stores, hospital emergency rooms, hotel lobbies, bank branches, restaurant queues, railway counters, and metro stations. Anywhere humans under stress interact with other humans under stress.
Indian aviation is stretched thin right now. Mass cancellations, crew shortages, price surges, service failures. Passengers are frustrated. Staff are exhausted.
The tinder is dry. Any spark can ignite.
But here’s the harder question:
If a trained pilot, someone conditioned for high-pressure cockpit decisions where hundreds of lives depend on composure, can reportedly lose control over a queue dispute, what about your frontline staff?
The ones who face angry customers daily with no training except “please calm down sir”?
The ones who’ve never once been walked through what to do when a customer shouts, threatens, or shoves?
The Real Cost Nobody Calculates
Every marketing head knows the customer acquisition cost.
How many know the cost of losing a customer because your frontline staff mishandled a situation?
It costs 5 to 7 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. That’s textbook.
But what about the customers who witness an incident? The ones standing in that queue at Terminal 1? The ones who reportedly saw a family traumatised and walked away thinking “I’m never flying through this terminal/airline again”?
What about the thousands who saw the viral post and formed an opinion about the airline, the airport, the entire experience?
You spend crores on advertising. Media campaigns. Brand films. Social media presence.
And one uncontrolled employee interaction, captured on a phone, shared on X, can undo all of it in hours.
The math is simple. The investment in preparing your people for difficult moments is a fraction of what you spend on projecting your brand. And the return? Protecting everything you’ve built.
What 31 Years in Uniform Taught Me
I spent 31 years in the Indian Army, with primarily, service in the Army Service Corps across geographies and environments that threw up daily sparks. Any of those sparks could have become fires. Some did. Most didn’t. Not by luck. By preparation.
The military doesn’t hope that difficult situations won’t arise. It trains for them. Relentlessly. Until the response becomes instinct.
VUCA is a term the military coined. Volatile. Uncertain. Complex. Ambiguous. We lived it before it became a boardroom buzzword.
Here’s what that training looked like:
Situational Awareness. Recognising escalation triggers before they ignite. Reading body language, tone shifts, and crowd dynamics. Spotting the moment a conversation turns into a confrontation. Forewarned is forearmed.
De-escalation Drills. Verbal techniques to defuse. Physical positioning to reduce threat. The tactical pause before responding. Not every provocation needs a reaction. Some need a breath.
Incident Command. Clear chain of responsibility. Someone is in charge. Everyone knows who. Immediate containment. Then the resolution. Protect bystanders first, especially the vulnerable.
Scenario Rehearsals. Wargaming situations before they happen. Building muscle memory. Learning to fail in practice so you don’t fail when it matters.
None of this required PowerPoint decks or fancy frameworks. It required conversations. Examples. Real and imagined scenarios discussed, debated, and drilled. Repeated until it stuck.
What Corporate Life and Consulting Assignments Showed Me
When I transitioned to the corporate world after three decades plus in uniform, I expected different challenges.
What I found instead were the same gaps. The same chasms. Just in different settings.
At Mahindra Logistics, managing operations across automotive plants and warehouses, I saw it. At the present engagement, working with 60+ project sites across India, I see it still. In every consulting engagement, the pattern repeats.
People are the same everywhere. Humans are humans.
What varies is the situation. The location. The stressors. The degree of pressure.
A factory floor in Pune. A warehouse in Luhari, Gurgaon. A project site in Odisha. An airport terminal in Delhi. The triggers differ. The human response to stress, to perceived disrespect, to ego bruising, that’s universal.
And universally, I’ve found the same gap: organisations invest in technical training, process training, and compliance training. They invest almost nothing in preparing people for the human moments that go wrong.
The difficult customer. The aggressive vendor. The colleague who loses their temper. The situation that escalates before anyone realises it’s escalating.
These moments aren’t in any SOP. And when they happen, people are left to improvise. Some handle it well. Many don’t.
The gap between “trained for the job” and “trained for the moment” is where reputations get destroyed.
What This Means for Leaders
If you’re a business leader reading this, the question isn’t whether such incidents can happen in your organisation.
They can. They probably already have, just not on camera. Yet.
The question is what you’re doing about it before the next one goes viral.
1. Know Your Flashpoints
Where do queues form? Where does friction occur? What happens when your systems fail, and your people must improvise? Map it. Observe it. Fix the design flaws before they become incident sites.
2. Train for Conflict, Not Just Service
Customer service training teaches people to smile. It doesn’t teach them what to do when someone screams in their face. Your frontline needs real preparation for real situations. Not theory. Examples. Discussion. Practice.
3. Don’t Leave Learning to the Water Cooler
After every incident, your staff will talk. At chai breaks. In WhatsApp groups. The narrative will form with or without you. If you don’t structure the learning, they’ll structure their own version. Often one-sided. Sometimes damaging.
Post-incident conversations need to be led. What happened. What could have been done differently? What we do next time. Not blame. Learning.
Your managers are busy. Daily operations consume them. Training falls to “when we have time”, which means never. This is exactly why learning can’t be a one-time workshop forgotten in a week. It needs to be woven into conversations. Short. Repeated. Reinforced until it becomes part of how your people think.
4. Calculate the Real ROI
Compare the cost of structured, ongoing readiness conversations with the cost of one viral incident.
Legal exposure. Brand damage. Customer churn. Employee turnover. Leadership distraction.
The math isn’t even close.
The Image That Should Stay With Every Leader
Somewhere today, a 7-year-old girl is reportedly trying to make sense of what she saw at Terminal 1.
Her father’s blood. Strangers shouting. Adults who should have known better, losing control.
She didn’t ask to witness that. Neither did the hundreds of passengers around her.
The investigation will run its course. Culpability will be assigned. Or it won’t.
But the real question isn’t who was wrong that day.
It’s what you, as a leader, will do tomorrow to make sure your people are ready for the moments that test them.
Your brand took years to build.
Your staff interact with customers every single day.
One untrained response. One lost temper. One incident captured and shared.
That’s all it takes.
Forewarned is forearmed.
The question is: are your people armed?
Col Zahl Tantra (Retd) is the Founder of Zentra Consulting. An MBA, PMP, and Member of the Business Continuity Institute, he is the first Indian Defence Forces officer to hold the CRMP certification. With 31 years of military experience across geographies and VUCA environments, followed by leadership roles at Mahindra Logistics and ongoing consulting engagements, he works with organisations to build frontline readiness through conversations, scenario discussions, and structured learning that sticks.
No massive slide decks. No jargon. Just practical preparation for the moments that matter.
Tailored for your organisation. Repeated until it resonates.
Pre-incident training to prevent. Post-incident restructuring to learn. Both delivered through conversations, not lectures.
If you’re a leader who wants your staff to handle difficult moments better, for themselves and for your customers, let’s have a conversation.
A discovery call costs nothing. An unprepared frontline can cost everything.