Summary
- Vistara faced turbulent times with pilots, but its CEO has now said that over 98% of its cockpit crew have signed new contracts.
- The salary restructuring of Vistara’s pilots, among other issues, led to protests and flight delays in the last few weeks.
- The airline is busy addressing issues with pilots ahead of its merger with Air India.
Indian full-service carrier Vistara has been battling issues with its pilots over the last several weeks. The airline’s cockpit crew is reportedly unhappy with their revised pay structure due to Vistara’s merger with Air India, among several other reasons.
Vistara has faced massive cancelations and delays in recent days as pilots did not show up for work as a way to protest the recent changes. But Vistara’s CEO Vinod Kannan has said that a majority of its pilots have now signed the new payment contract, with the airline addressing the concerns of the remaining pilots.
98% of Vistara pilots sign new contract
The last few weeks have been quite turbulent for Vistara. The airline is headed for a merger with Air India, which means it will see several changes in its operations and employee contracts. And one of the things that did not go down well with its pilots was the proposed salary restructuring in their revised contracts.
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Amid significant operational disruptions in the last few weeks due to pilots not reporting for work, Vistara’s CEO has now said that more than 98% of its pilots have agreed to the new contract. This is, indeed, quite a U-turn from recent developments.
According to The Hindu, the airline chief Vinod Kannan recently held a town hall and said Vistara continues to stand by what its HR communicated earlier. Its pilots were informed that a failure to sign a new contract by March 15 would result in them losing a one-time payout linked to the merger and also affect their position in the sequence for an upgrade.
Pilots worried over multiple issues
Vistara’s pilots have reportedly been dissatisfied over multiple issues, including stressful flight schedules and delays in upgrades, and it came to a head when the airline came up with revised contracts that reduced their minimum guaranteed flying hours to 40 in some cases, from 70 hours.
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Related
Vistara Experiences Operational Disruptions Due To Pilot Shortage
The airline had to cancel over 100 flights in the past week.
This was particularly difficult for some junior first officers who took loans for their pilot training and found adjusting to the new salary structure tricky. Kannan admitted that Vistara did not construct its network plan according to the number of pilots on its payroll, leading to them working longer hours. But he said things are on the mend, and the management is working to resolve such issues.
Vistara addressing the issues
Kannan was apologetic about the inconvenience Vistara passengers faced in the last few days and said that the airline took the issue seriously. The Hindu quotes him as saying,
“We are addressing this on a war footing… we are continuing to hire more pilots and are also carefully scaling back our operations slightly to provide the much needed resilience, and a buffer in the rosters. We have also deployed larger aircraft like our B787-9 Dreamliner and A321neo aircraft on select domestic routes to accommodate more customers, wherever possible.”
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With the Air India-Vistara merger scheduled to be completed in 2025, hopefully, Vistara will have its employee-related issues resolved in the coming months.
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