Jet Airways edging out expat pilots

The airline, after termination of the service contracts of 50 expats, now has 88 foreign pilots

During 2014-15, Jet Airways has prematurely terminated the contracts of 50 of its expatriate pilots as a part of cost-cutting measures and reducing dependency on the high-cost foreign flight crew.

“We have prematurely terminated the service contracts of 50 expatriate pilots between April 1, 2014 and March 31, 2015,” Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Ravichandran Narayan said during a post-earnings analysts call.

He said as part of the contract obligations, the airline paid retrenchment compensation to the sacked pilots. After termination of the contracts of the 50 expat pilots, the Naresh Goyal-promoted airline now has a total of 1,120 pilots of whom 88 are foreign pilots.

The Directorate General of Civil Aviation has given the airline a deadline of December 2016 to phase out the expatriate pilots. Narayan  said Jet Airways has taken several steps particularly in the areas like sales and distribution, engineering and maintenance in this regard.

"We are continuously improving our aircraft utilisation by adding more red-eye flights and early hour departures in our schedule," he said.

A red-eye flight departs late at night and arrives early next morning. Because of their very low priced tickets, these flights are quite popular abroad, especially in the US and Europe.

Narayan also said the airline was in the process of restructuring its overseas hub at Abu Dhabi by rejiging some of the flights and withdrawing a few.

"We are restructuring our Abu Dhabi gateway by converting Goa-Abu Dhabi-Goa flight into seasonal one and cancelling the Abu Dhabi-Kuwait and Abu Dhabi-Dammam services," he said, adding the airline has also decided to reduce the frequency from three daily flights to two on Mumbai-Bangkok route from July 15.

We continue to rationalise our route network in line with the industry condition and traffic evolution, he added.