Vistara on Sunday said it is scaling back its operations by 25-30 flights per day to ease the pressure on pilots, underlining that the airline, hit by delays, has improved its on-time performance over the last few days.
The announcement comes a day after the crisis-hit airline’s CEO said that 98% of its pilots have signed the new contracts with the revised salary structure which had led to several of them calling in sick and causing flight cancellations.
The airline has stressed that the cancellations were done mostly in the domestic network and much ahead of time to minimize inconvenience to the passengers.
“We are carefully scaling back our operations by around 25-30 flights per day, i.e. roughly 10% of the capacity we were operating. This will take us back to the same level of flight operations as at the end of February 2024, and provide the much-needed resilience and buffer in the rosters,” said an airline spokesperson.
“In line with what we had said earlier, with this all the changes for the month of April 2024 have been done and the situation has already gotten better with our on-time performance improving for the last few days. Looking ahead, we are hopeful of stable operations for the rest of the month and beyond,” the spokesperson added.
In recent weeks, discontentment has been simmering among pilots at Vistara, which is in the process of getting merged with Air India, following the new contracts wherein there are concerns that fixed pay component is getting reduced and there is more flying-linked incentive in the salary structure.
Over the weekend of March 31 to April 1, the full service carrier experienced severe operational disruptions and numerous flights were cancelled. Earlier this week, aviation regulator DGCA asked the airline to submit a daily report on flight cancellations and delays.
The civil aviation ministry is also monitoring the situation of flight cancellations at Vistara, which saw resignations of at least 15 senior first officers in the recent past.
The airline maintains that it is addressing the issue on a “war footing”.
Vistara, a joint venture between Tatas and Singapore Airlines, has 6,500 staff, including 1,000 pilots and 2,500 cabin crew.
As per the summer schedule, which started from March 31, the airline is to operate a little over 300 flights daily. It has around 800 pilots.
)