EXCLUSIVE | Vistara CEO shares flight path for 2025, to hire more pilots and crew

In an exclusive interaction with CNBC TV18’s Managing Editor Shereen Bhan, Vinod Kannan, CEO of Vistara said that the company would be hiring more pilots and cabin crew members.

“We do plan to hire more pilots, we need to and we will. It is an ongoing process, we are also looking to train more pilots who are there in the system,” Kannan said. Vistara currently has over 1,000 pilots.

Vistara which currently has a fleet of 70 aircraft in our feet consists of 63 narrow bodies and 7 wide bodies. Vistara recently received its 70th and final aircraft a few weeks back which completes its order book.

Laying out the flight path for FY25, Kannan said, “There’s no additional aircraft or fleet growth that’s coming in FY25, but whatever we have now, we will be utilising it to the extent possible by ramping up on pilots, ramping up on cabin crew as is needed.”

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Kannan also highlighted that this might take some time hence the airline is currently rationalising its operations. He said, “While this might take a little bit of time, that’s precisely the reason why we had to have this situation of scaling back just a little bit, by 5% to 7%.

So that we can create that buffer not just for operational resilience but also good for perhaps providing a slightly better kind of roster for the existing pilots.”

Vistara’s CEO also acknowledged the fact that certain pilots were being utilised to their full potential. He said, “Yes, we have been flying more, we have been flying our pilots more and the utilisation is higher, which also means that the pilots are to some extent stretched a little bit more.

But broadly and fundamentally it’s kind of a similar practice of systems. Having said this, I think there is definitely scope for us to hear more from the pilots. There’s hope for us to adjust this. Based on the feedback that we get from pilots, that’s exactly what we are going to do. We’ll need to take into account feedback from our pilots to see how we can improve that further,” he added.