India, Dec. 11 -- India loves to boast about being the world's fastest-growing aviation market, but the recent IndiGo crisis has stripped away the glossy PR and exposed a far more embarrassing reality: our aviation system works smoothly only for the powerful, while the common citizen is treated as an afterthought. As politicians, industrialists and celebrities glide through the skies in private jets without a minute's delay, ordinary Indians were left stranded in terminals, sleeping on cold floors, staring helplessly at departure boards filled with cancellations. This is not turbulence; this is a systemic failure that both IndiGo and the government helped create through complacency, arrogance and poor planning.

IndiGo controls more than ...