Who will command the AI 777s?

Air India's fourth Boeing 777-200LR, scheduled for delivery in the second week of December, has not reached the airline. A shortage of commanders for the new generation aircraft will probably delay it further.

"Air-India could not take deliveries of two of its 777LRs from the manufacturer on time because it did not have enough pilots to fly these aircraft," said a pilot with the airline on condition of anonymity.

The national carrier finds itself in a situation where deliveries are underway for its Rs 35,000-crore order for 69 aircraft (eight B777-200LRs, 16 777"�300ERs, 27 787 Dreamliners and 18 B737-800s). Air-India has only 22 commanders to fly the B777 family of aircraft.

Air-India refused to confirm the number. "The entire delivery schedule for the 777LRs has been awkwardly planned by Air-India. There is an acute shortage of pilots as well as engineers trained for the aircraft," sources close to the developments said, adding: "The airline is now into a major training spree both for its pilots as well as its engineers. But it is impacting the operational schedules of the airline."

Till date, Air-India has got three 777LRs and two 777ERs with more immediate deliveries planned. For any fleet to be optimally utilized, each aircraft needs to fly roughly 12 hours a day. As against this, Air-India is flying the current fleet of 777LRs only for 10 hours. In other words, these aircraft are operationally underutilized. The reason is shortage of pilots.

The airline will be getting five of the 777LRs it plans to fly to US from Delhi next year and later from Bangalore to San Francisco.

Every additional delivery will impact the resource crunch with the airline thereby affecting flight schedules and reducing the optimal utilisation of the aircraft. "Commanders flying 777 aircraft currently command a premium and are in demand from airlines all over the world. Since a pilot is certified on the aircraft type and the 777 are a new generation aircraft, there is a scarcity of these pilots world over," said an official with Air-India commenting on the shortage.

The airline in an e-mail response said, "There is a requirement of 12 commanders required for a B777-200LR aircraft to facilitate its non-stop flights. The B-777- 300ER which has a stop over route needs only six commanders. Since the cockpit equipment of the B777-300ER and the B777"�200LR is 90 per cent same, the commanders are inter changeable between the two. We cannot provide a bifurcation as to the number of commanders flying the LR. We have a conversion exercise in place for the pilots to get a license to fly both these aircraft."