2 in 3 wide body flights of AI delayed on Valentine's Day: Only crew cannot be blamed

New Delhi: Air India’s chronic flight delays have been  blamed on cabin crew reporting late, engineers and even cockpit crew delays. But is crew tardiness the only reason for AI’s dismal on-time performance? Maybe not. According to sources, for four days this month, late arrival of crew accounted for less than 3% of delays across the Air India network. Crew indiscipline is rampant and needs to be curbed but perhaps Air India needs to also restructure operations in other departments such as engineering, crew scheduling etc. Especially since the Ministry of Civil Aviation is now examining a daily report on AI’s flight delays and reasons for each delay. [caption id=“attachment_1211147” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  AFP[/caption] That crew tardiness alone could not have caused such massive delays will become apparent if one were to examine these startling numbers for Air India’s OTP: Less than 40% of its wide body flights took off on time on Valentine’s Day this year. This means only about one in three flights (most of them international) was on time that day. On the night of February 14-15, wide body OTP was a little less than 50% which means every second wide body flight on Air India’s network was delayed. For four successive days, from February 14 to 18, at least every second wide body flight across Air India’s network was delayed and on February 19th, not even 3 out of 10 WB flights took off on time. During the same four days (February 14-18), Air India’s narrow body fleet saved it the blushes, with lowest OTP of 60% which means the worst on-time performance was one in three flights delayed. Sources pointed out that such chronic delays across the WB fleet happened largely because of frequent snags in the Dreamliners, partly due to crew reporting late and also because of engineering issues. Though only 18 of Air India’s wide body aircraft fleet of 38 are the Boeing 787 Dreamliners, they account for 230 hours of flying out of 400 hours. So frequent snags in these aircraft hits the airline’s WB operations network wide. Why then is such a huge controversy is being created over cabin crew tardiness? As we have reported earlier, there is a proposal to deduct Rs 500 from the salary of a crew member for every five minute delay in reporting to work. Though this is only a proposal and it still needs clearance from Air India’s board of directors, why only penalize crew instead of plugging loopholes in other departments? This penalty is being discussed within the airline after Civil Aviation Secretary V Somasundaran said earlier this month that any delay in flights attributable to late arrival of crew must be dealt with by lopping off some of the errant crew member’s salary. Airline sources has earlier claimed only 53% flights (on the entire AI network) were on time in December and close to 60% in January. They had further claimed that the OTP for February has improved significantly, to between 75-80% till now. The data given earlier in this piece will show such claims are incorrect. An airline official said as of today, AI’s engineering department gives no clarity on how many total aircraft are available for operation the following day, till about 4 am. This makes smart crew scheduling near impossible. It has now been asked to clarify how many and what type of aircraft are available by 5 pm the previous day. Then, crew scheduling itself needs to go completely online, unlike the present system of manual upgrades which are constantly being changed. In short, the various departments within the airline need to work in tandem to ensure smooth operations.