C

ritics have accused the government of being too lenient toward the country'€™s largest budget airline, Lion Air, after extensive flight delays disrupted the travel of more than 3,000 passengers last week, immediately alluding to the '€œinfluence'€ of its controlling owner, Rusdi Kirana, who is a member of the President'€™s advisory council.

The civil aviation authority announced on Monday it had strongly reprimanded Lion Air, banned it from applying for new service route permits, set up a special team to audit the management of the airline and seen to it that the company fully compensated affected passengers in line with civil aviation law.

However, some analysts and consumer organizations have demanded stronger action, urging the government to suspend some of Lion Air'€™s service routes as a penalty for its utterly poor performance because last week'€™s debacle was the second massive flight disruption since September 2013.

But we think suspending several of Lion Air'€™s service routes is not a good solution. Such a drastic measure would instead cause a new major disruption of domestic flight services across the country as the low-cost airline now controls almost 40 percent of domestic services.

A thorough audit of the company'€™s system of management is more urgent and important to find out why the grounding of just three airplanes for mechanical problems set off such a significant disruption of its services from Jakarta'€™s international airport.

Even though the impact of the flight delays was exacerbated by the fact that the disruption took place during Chinese New Year, the impact would not have been so massive had the company properly executed its standard operating procedures for crisis management.

Every airline is required to have at hand step-by-step standard operating procedures (SOP) for two kinds of crisis management caused respectively by massive flight delays and plane crashes. Since the flight delays were not caused by external factors, such as weather conditions or traffic gridlock within the airport, the pandemonium caused by angry passengers who ransacked and damaged equipment in the terminal should be blamed on Lion Air'€™s poor management.

Early indications showed that Lion Air had been too aggressive in expanding its services without the support of an adequate number of airplanes and the civil aviation authority also should be blamed for having allowed the airline to ply so many routes without thoroughly checking its fleet capacity.

The volume of domestic air services has been expanding by more than 20 percent a year over the past decade and more cities across the vast archipelago have become interconnected, both as a result of the role of low-cost airlines such as Lion Air.

But the government should improve its supervision of the airline industry and an audit of Lion Air'€™s system of management will also help the civil aviation authority to find out what is lacking in its oversight mechanism.