Vistara’s troubled phase of the past two to three weeks is now behind it, the company’s top executive reassured harried employees on Thursday. “I assure you that the worst is behind us, and we have already stabilised our operations, with our on-time performance increasing to 89% (second highest among all Indian airlines),” the company’s chief executive officer Vinod Kannan said in an internal message to employees, a copy of which has been seen by Mint.
The Delhi-based full-service airline had to cancel 30-50 flights per day over the past two weeks. The company blames rostering and other issues for the trouble, but mass pilot absence due to issues related to the airline’s merger with Air India also played its part. Both airlines are owned by the Tata group; Vistara is a joint venture with Singapore Airlines.
“There were multitude of reasons behind this (the disruptions), including ATC (air traffic control) delays, bird hits, and maintenance activities early last month—all of which had a cascading effect on a highly optimised network,” Kannan added in the message to employees. “We were stretched in our pilot rosters and there was not enough resilience to withstand injects that we could otherwise have weathered.”
The airline has blamed poor rostering for the network disruption over the past few weeks, followed by large number of unplanned sick leaves as there were not enough pilots to back up and the existing lot were already stretched to their maximum limits. In 2022, Vistara had implemented a fully automated crew rostering solution for improved management of its cabin crew and pilots across the network.
The relationship between the airline and some pilots has also soured over the past few months over implementation of a uniform pay structure, which would effectively reduce the salaries of Vistara pilots by bringing them on par with Air India after their merger.
Under the transition in the run-up to the merger between Air India and Vistara, the pilots of Vistara get a fixed salary for 40 hours instead of 70 hours earlier. In addition, they receive payment in lieu of extra flying hours, and rewards will also be given based on the years of service with the airline. The new pay structure came into effect since last month.
“Several pilots continue to remain unsure about their future at the organisation amidst the merger between Air India and Vistara,” a pilot told Mint on condition of anonymity.
Ameya Joshi, founder of aviation research platform Network Thoughts said the Vistara-Air India merger is more challenging than AirAsia India’s merger with Air India Express, which is not yet complete. Both were to be completed by now as per earlier estimations and announcements. Vistara is over twice as big as AirAsia India and comes with a mix of multiple fleet types and subtypes unlike AirAsia India, and a positioning that is more premium than Air India in which it is to be merged. “The road could be thorny but one where differences get ironed out over a period of time as overall all entities are on the growth path and any stagnation is temporary,” said Joshi.
As per the latest data from the ministry of Civil Aviation, Vistara’s on-time performance on 10 April fell to 77.3% (it was 89% on 9 April). On 10 April, Akasa was the most punctual with 91.8% on-time performance (OTP), followed by IndiGo at 81.9%, Air India (76.5%) and SpiceJet (77.6%).
To be sure, daily OTP data are not a robust measure of an airline’s overall punctuality, because it is affected by several factors including the number of aircraft being rostered on a particular day, among others.
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Published: 11 Apr 2024, 01:58 PM IST
