Air India To Hire More Flight Crew

Monday, 30th June 2014 at 03:44am

Air India marked a historic milestone in India's aviation history as it makes its way to the elite grouping of global airlines after more than seven years since it first attempted to join the alliance.

The state-owned flag carrier became the 27th full-pledged member airline in Star Alliance, the world's largest global alliance of carriers spanning across 5 continents.

On this historic occasion, the top executive of Air India is planning to discuss anew with the government to augment its workforce, particularly its flight crew, to support its service improvement program in an effort to raise its service standard at par with the rest of the alliance.

The planned hiring of more flight personnel, however, goes against the airline's move to downsize its staff due to wage issue that adds to the airline's financial woes. The carrier's customer service department, though, didn't disclose as to the number of additional personnel they are going to hire.

Air India, at present, has over 3,400 flight crews on regular payroll while more than 800 are on a contractual basis. Before the invitation from Star Alliance came late last year, the flag carrier was planning to cut its flight staff down to a little over 2,000.

Air India has long transgressed the stipulation laid down by the country's Director General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) on the minimum number of flight crew for each type of aircraft used for a particular flight. In a Dreamliner, for example, DGCA has ordered the airline to limit its crew to a maximum of nine and a minimum of seven. But the airline has always found a way to ignore DGCA's directive, resulting to over-staffing.

Interestingly, the flag carrier has just axed 45 of its cabin crew due to below-standard performance and is even planning to serve more notices of termination to 59 other flight staff within the next month.

The airline has been in the red for seven years in a row since its merger with another state-controlled carrier, Indian Airline, in 2006.

Air India's current workforce totals over 23,000, down by about 10,000 during the merger. The figure does not include the over 13,000 employees in ground handling and engineering operations plus over 3,500 personnel on a contractual basis and another 2,200 casual employees.

By: Pete Lee.