Air India flights on busy routes

On August 19, an Air India flight to Kolkata was annulled at the endure moment. Sources say that this was on annual of the airline’s absence of its Airbus A320 commanders. This area of the airline’s cockpit aggregation operates calm flights and few all-embracing flights to neighbouring


destinations such as Dubai and Bangkok.

Sources in the airline said that the curtailment resulted in common adjournment of flights on active routes abutting metros such as Kolkata, Chennai and Hyderabad to the city.
The airline requires added than 45 A320 commanders to advance its accepted flight agenda but is abbreviate of at atomic three to four pilots, sources added.

One of the affidavit for the curtailment is the airline’s accommodation to stop command training its co-pilots 5 months ago.

“When the training was on, the airline would get up to 10 new commanders every month,” said a chief administration official, abacus that it takes amid 12 to 18 months to benedict a co-pilot into a commander.
The airline’s application drive to appoint 200 new co-pilots is awaiting with the administrator and managing director. “All the anxious departments barring the CMD’s appointment accept austere it,” said addition chief pilot.

Now, the administration has asked the Indian Commercial Pilots Association (ICPA), the abutment apery A320 agile pilots, to acquiesce addendum of flight assignment hours above the absolute set in their mutual agreement.

According to the acceding a pilot can fly a best of 80 hours a ages or 240 hours in three after months. “The curtailment can be tackled for now if the abutment agrees to accomplish an exception,” an official said.
The AI agent did not acknowledge to HT’s query.