The crew protest that disrupted the operations of Vistara, the full-service airline owned by Tata Group and SIA seems to have ended, at least for now as more than 98 per cent of pilots have reportedly signed the new contract.
Vistara CEO Vinod Kannan on Saturday said some pilots have some concerns and queries regarding the contract.
The airline is engaging with them to clarify and resolve the concerns, Kannan said and added that “over 98 per cent of pilots have signed the new contract”.
According to Kannan, the airline is addressing the current situation on a war footing and continuing to hire more pilots.
Several Vistara pilots had gone on long sick leaves last week resulting in a crew shortage that forced the airline to cancel many flights.
The protesting pilots had raised two major concerns — rostering and new contracts.
The airline which has a workforce of 6,500 staff, including 1,000 pilots and 2,500 cabin crew is closing in on a merger with Tata Group’s flagship carrier Air India.
Pilots have alleged that the company’s rostering procedure was resulting in them being overworked and exhausted. This along with the impending merger with Air India after which their salaries will see a reduction as per the terms of the new contract had resulted in many pilots revolving.
Vistara has apologised to the public after the airline cancelled a significant number of flights during the past few days.
“We acknowledge that the recent experience of our customers fell short of the standards that we hold ourselves to and we sincerely apologise for the same,” Vistara said in a statement.
Kannan said the need to cancel flights at a short notice will not happen after this weekend as the buffer situation for pilots is stabilising.
“It might be a reduced schedule… we are back to normal as far as the flights that are operating… the need to cancel flights at short notice will not happen after this weekend,” he said.
As part of reduced operations, Kannan said the airline has cut 20-25 daily flights.
Vistara is to operate more than 300 flights daily in the ongoing summer schedule.
“We are now working on the schedule for May, and we will try and optimise it to come to usual kind of operations… (we) expect normal operations (by May),” Kannan said.
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