Lohani cracks whip, wants Air India's grounded narrow bodies to fly soon

New Delhi: Air India has been struggling with aircraft availability in its narrow body fleet for quite some time now. On any given day, 8-10 NBs from the fleet of 62 are grounded for lack of spares and other maintenance issues. But this is set to change.[caption id=“attachment_2400882” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Air India CMD Ashwani Lohani. Image from Lohani’s Twitter account[/caption] An Air India official told Firstpost that the engineering department has been allocated a “substantial” amount of money for getting the grounded aircraft up and flying. According to this official, at least five more aircraft should be made available in the next two days to take the total to 58-59 daily; already fleet availability is up to 54 aircraft in the last few days. “The CMD has made it clear to the engineering department that 58-59 aircraft should be available daily by month end. He has allocated a substantial amount to engineering for purchasing spares and other requirements,” this official said on condition of anonymity. The enhanced fleet should be good news for Air India. First, it will ensure better on-time performance and increased frequencies on some sectors. Second, it will allow the airline to better compete with aggressive private airlines like IndiGo and Jet Airways during the upcoming winter schedule when these airlines are likely to increase domestic flights. The official quoted earlier said Delhi-Surat-Delhi will now deploy an Airbus 320 family aircraft from Thursday instead of the 70-seater CRJ being used currently. Besides, the airline has recently started Delhi-Leh-Delhi flight which is also on the A320 family aircraft. The increased fleet availability should help both these routes. Air India has been struggling with its Airbus 320 fleet for quite some time. It has seven Airbus 320 aircraft in its fleet which are more than 20 years old. This means every third Airbus 320 aircraft in Air India’s fleet of 21 Airbus 320s is an old war horse. Last year, Air India’s board of directors had approved of a plan to take eight new Airbus 320 aircraft on lease to ease out these old war horses but only three have been delivered till now. The availability and condition of Air India’s fleet is in focus now, after a recent incident where one of the old aircraft developed hydraulic failure while approaching Delhi on a Varanasi-Delhi flight with 146 passengers on board. The pilot was forced to seek emergency landing at Delhi. Later, there were reports of some sparks from the rear of the aircraft, after landing, which forced the captain to order evacuation using chutes - and lead to some passengers sustaining minor injuries. New chairman and managing director Ashwani Lohani has been flagging various areas of concern as he tried to get Air India back to peak performance. These include: 1. Getting at least 58-59 Airbus 320 family aircraft for flights by the end of the month. This should happen on target. Lohani has also made it clear that the responsibility of keeping aircraft clean lies with the engineering team. This includes seat covers, carpets, curtains, proper upkeep of in-flight entertainment systems etc. Besides, the engineering subsidiary AIESL has to come up with a detailed plan for spending the $300 million raised through ECBs earlier, which Air India’s board has already said should be deployed in fleet maintenance. AIESL is also tasked with drawing up a detailed business plan for the Nagpur MRO (maintenance, repair and overhaul) unit. 2. The commercial department has been tasked with evaluating the entire hub-and-spoke model of Air India. On the critical issue of loss making routes of Air India, the CMD has set up a committee under the chairmanship of GM (revenue management) for evaluating these. The commercial department has also been asked to work on new flights, chart out a yield management strategy and another one for fixing fares. 3. The milestones set under the Turnaround Plan of Air India (which is the basis for annual funds’ infusion into the airline by the government) to be monitored by a core team. As per the Turnaround Plan, the airline should have had 72 narrow body aircraft in its fleet by now. It has been looking to lease 19 narrow bodies in all (including the eight 320s) but 14 of these may arrive only by 2017. The airline needs a plan of action much before then, at least for its domestic operations.