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On day four Air India's domestic operations badly hit

— Photo: Shashi Ashiwal

STALEMATE CONTINUES:Air India flights parked at the Mumbai International Airport on Saturday.

New Delhi/Mumbai: Air India's domestic operations came close to a standstill on Saturday as it operated less than 20 per cent of flights on the fourth day of strike by its defiant pilots and the State-owned carrier was forced to take two Kingfisher 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 Union 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At least 135 of 165 domestic flights through the day were withdrawn by the national carrier as the required number of pilots were not available for duty, airline officials said.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”.

Mr. Kapur said ICPA, which has been de-recognised, was ready for talks “but the management wants to lock the airline down and doesn't want to talk.”

“It has been 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?” Mr. Bhinder said.

Mr. Kapur told journalists in Mumbai, “As we are unable to get in touch with the management or the government for the dialogue so far, we cannot but continue our agitation.”

Regretting the “adamancy” of the management and Civil Aviation Ministry, he said, “even our backdoor efforts to get talks going have failed so far.”

The pilots on Friday had said they were willing to go to jail and refused to call off their agitation till the government assured them of 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 Rs.16,000 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 on Saturday, virtually bringing the entire domestic operations to a halt, said officials. The operations of the other three segments remained normal. The flights operated on the Delhi-Patna-Varanasi-Delhi and Delhi-Mumbai-Delhi sectors with Air India call-signs — AI-409/410 and AI-805/806 respectively, they said. Earlier, there was speculation that the Air India was in talks with Kingfisher to “loan” pilots to fly their aircraft. However, a Kingfisher spokesperson denied any such move.

“We have curtailed more than 75 per cent of our domestic flights and are operating on high-density trunk routes only,” an AI spokesperson said. — PTI

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