Air India Express has been forced to curtail its schedule of the next several days due to non-availability of cabin crew in adequate numbers after over a hundred crew members called in sick since Tuesday evening, the budget airline’s managing director Aloke Singh said in a letter to employees on Wednesday, it is learnt. Singh also told employees that all communication channels with the airline’s leadership are open for any concern that needs to be addressed. A town hall has been preponed to Thursday in an evident bid to defuse the crisis, sources said.
The Tata group airline, which is an arm of Air India, saw network-wide disruptions on Wednesday, affecting over 90 flights. A section of the cabin crew, mostly senior members, reported sick evidently to protest against the changes in the carrier’s human resources (HR) policies. Air India Express and AIX Connect (formerly AirAsia India) are in the process of being merged and the airline has also stepped up hiring of cabin crew to support its expansion.
The airline is yet to give details of the curtailed flight schedule. The Air India Express-AIX Connect combine operates over 350 daily flights and has flexibility to go up to around 400 daily flights as per summer schedule for this year. While the airline has over 2,000 cabin crew in its ranks, the fact that the senior members called in sick led to a disproportionate impact on the airline’s network.
The disruptions led to a number of passengers taking to social media to complain about cancellations and long delays. The Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) has asked the airline to furnish a report on flight cancellations, apart from asking it to resolve the issues promptly. MoCA also “advised” Air India Express to ensure proper facilities to affected passengers as per regulations. The ministry also requested airport operators to provide assistance to affected passengers.
According to sources, Singh told employees that this action by a section of the cabin crew was not representative of all cabin crew members working with the airline. He also called upon the senior cabin crew members to help build the airline further and achieve its vision of growth and expansion, it is learnt.
In April, the Air India Express Employees Union, which says it has 300 senior cabin crew as members, wrote to Tata group and Air India Chairman N Chandrasekaran, alleging that the airline was being mismanaged and there was a “lack of equality in treatment” of employees. The union had complained that the Air India Express management was disregarding experience and merit, and external candidates were being preferred over the airline’s own eligible and qualified candidates. It also complained that take-home pay for cabin crew has gone down due to merger as some of the earlier allowances have been removed.
Sources in the airline indicated that with the Air India Express-AIX Connect merger, the airline is moving towards a merit-based appreciation system instead of a progression system based on seniority, and this appears to have fanned the fire of disgruntlement among a section of the cabin crew, particularly the senior members. Additional hiring of fresh cabin crew is also learnt to have led to concerns among existing crew members about career progression.
According to a source in Air India Express, the airline management had attempted to address all concerns of the dissatisfied employees in a recent town hall, and all internal channels of communication remain open for employees to engage with the management to resolve their concerns.
The Tata group is in the process of consolidating its airline business by merging Air India Express and AIX Connect into one budget airline under the Air India Express brand. On the full-service carrier front, Vistara will be merged with Air India. The experience in India and even globally shows that airline mergers can be extremely complicated, particularly on the staff integration front. One of the major reasons behind the recent pilots’ protest at Vistara is understood to be the new pay structure that is in line with Air India, but not as remunerative as the contracts Vistara pilots already had.
In a statement released on Wednesday morning, an Air India Express spokesperson said: “A section of our cabin crew has reported sick at the last minute, starting last night, resulting in flight delays and cancellations. While we are engaging with the crew to understand the reasons behind these occurrences, our teams are actively addressing this issue to minimise any inconvenience caused to our guests as a result.”
“Guests impacted by cancellations will be offered a full refund or complimentary rescheduling to another date. Guests flying with us today are requested to check if their flight is affected, before heading to the airport,” the airline’s spokesperson added.
