Is Air India sacking IPG pilots only to hire them back?

Agitating Air India pilots affiliated to the Indian Pilots Guild (IPG) on Monday said they had not received any information on employment termination from the airline. They were responding to reports that the airline plans to sack all the remaining 323 pilots who have not reported for work for the past 35 days, and hire fresh co-pilots and commanders for its international operations.

The agitating pilots also seemed amused at Air India’s advertisement seeking type rated commanders and first officers to operate its wide body aircraft fleet of Boeing 777s, 747s and 737s. It appears as if the airline wants to sack the IPG pilots only to hire them back - but obviously at different salary and service conditions.

“How many type rated 777 commanders will you find in India? It is clear that the airline wants us to re-apply for the job,” said a senior IPG pilot requesting anonymity. He said CPl holders (which refers to pilots who only hold a commercial pilot license but are not trained to command a flight) would take two years and cost Rs 50 lakh each to be trained. “All instructors are busy today and if (as the minister had indicated earlier) 100 pilots are to be trained, it will take 5-6 years”.

While the assertions of the pilots may be true, they still have much to lose too since the Dharmadhikari committee report’s recommendations will soon start being implemented.That means pilots will not find salary, incentives and service conditions as lucrative as they are right now if they get hired by AI again.

Civil Aviation minister Ajit Singh has already made it clear that the two erstwhile airlines - Air India and Indian Airlines- would be merged for better human resource management, allowing pay scales, working hours, career progression to be rationalised. That will not go down well with the agitating IPG pilots.

Business as usual?

The agitating pilots are also skeptical about Singh’s claim that about 75 percent international operations of AI continue to operate as normal and that the agitating pilots are not needed by the ailing airline.

Speaking to Firstpost, the pilot said, “the minister says 75 percent of international operations are normal. Air India has about 20 Boeing 777 aircraft and five Boeing 747. It is currently operating only five or six B777s and two B747s. How can this be called normal operations? In AI Express, only six of the 21 available aircraft are being used”.

He added that against a capacity of about 1,200 seats on the Delhi-London, Delhi-New York and Mumbai-London flights earlier, the airline is offering only about 350 seats on its Delhi-London-New York flights.

Meanwhile, Singh said that it is for the Air India management to take action now (on sacking pilots). “These pilots have not come to work for more than 30 days….It is an illegal strike,” he said. “They have defied the High Court. We have requested them again and again to come back to work. So, it is for the management to decide how long they can keep them on the payroll when they are not working. And they have no intention of coming back”.

AI officials did not confirm if termination letters are being sent out from today. But the airline has set up a committee to review its global operations to find out how many pilots are required to operate flights. The committee will advise the management on the actual number of pilots needed to run Air India’s international operations, especially since there is a growing feeling within the airline that it has far more pilots than needed.