The airline operated less than 20% of flights on the fourth day of strike by its defiant pilots and the state-owned carrier was forced to take two Kingfisher Airlines planes on wet lease to ferry stranded passengers.
Air India's domestic operations came close to a standstill today as it operated less than 20% of flights on the fourth day of strike by its defiant pilots and the state-owned carrier was forced to take two Kingfisher Airlines planes on wet lease to ferry stranded passengers.
The pilots on their part said their agitation would continue and regretted the "adamancy" of the management and the civil aviation ministry not to hold talks with them.
The airline tried to put in place some alternative strategies to minimise hardships caused to hundreds of stranded passengers by taking two aircraft from Kingfisher Airlines on wet lease and flew a large number of them to Patna, Varanasi and Mumbai. Pilots are also made available in a wet lease arrangement.
At least 135 of 165 domestic flights through the day were withdrawn by the national carrier as the required number of pilots were not available for duty, airline officials said.
Most passengers, including those who had booked on Air India earlier, cancelled their tickets and queues were missing outside their counters at the airports, whereas those of the private carriers were crowded.
Amid threat of a lockout and mass sacking, Indian Commercial Pilots Association (ICPA) general secretary Rishabh Kapur said they would continue their stir till they were called for negotiations on their demands while its President A S Bhinder told PTI "as of now, there is no formal offer for talks".
Kapur said that ICPA, which has been derecognised, was ready for talks "but the management wants to lock the airline down and doesn't want to talk".
"It has been the mismanagement, not from now but from the beginning. We have also asked for an enquiry as to why all this happened. Why don't they do that instead of locking it down," Bhinder said.
Kapur told reporters in Mumbai, "As we are unable to get in touch with the management or the government for the dialogue so far, we can not but continue our agitation."
Regretting the "adamancy" of the management and civil aviation ministry, Kapur said, "Even our backdoor efforts to get talks going have failed so far."
The pilots had yesterday said they were willing to go to jail and refused to call off their agitation till the government assured them a time-bound resolution of all their demands.
The pilots are demanding a higher fixed component in the salary package, a CBI probe into alleged mismanagement which has led to losses of over Rs16,000 crore and removal of airline CMD Arvind Jadhav holding him responsible for the "financial mess".
The airline operates 320 scheduled flights daily through its entire network, including those operated by its subsidiaries Alliance Air, Air India Express and Air India (International).
Air India (Domestic) operates 165. Of these, 135 were cancelled today, virtually bringing the entire domestic operations to a halt, the officials said, adding that operations of the other three segments remained normal.
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