It was just one of those post-marriage pangs. But one that left the newly created airline major Air India and the entire civil aviation ministry red-faced over the weekened.
A meeting of the civil aviation ministry with the top brass of the public carrier on Tuesday to look into the recent delays in some Air India flights discovered that while the Maharaja?s ageing fleet was hit by technical snags and other factors like pilot shortage, it was lack of proper coordination between the airlines? Delhi and Mumbai cells that aggravated the entire situation.
After the merger, Air India?s Mumbai based control cell has been fully operational but Indian Airline?s control cell in Delhi has been at a much lower level of operations. What made it worse was that many of the airline?s employees left after finishing their shift, leaving a skeletal staff at the check-in counters, leading to even more delays due to long queues.Tuesday?s meeting decided that the ministry would now onwards monitor all important flights on a daily basis in a bid to check delays and cancellations, official sources said.
Apart from this, it was also decided that a meeting between Nacil CMD V Thulasidas and RK Singh, joint secretary in the ministry, would be called to discuss and decide on a methodology for the pruning and consolidation of routes on a continuous basis.
The national carrier has been asked to set up a coordination mechanism at the IGI Airport to avoid such a crisis in the future.
The mechanism, said an airline spokesperson, meant a control cell monitoring availability of aircraft, crew and other services required to ensure continuous and efficient movement of air services.
The ministry has also decided to monitor some of the public carrier?s more important flights on West-bound routes. These will include AI 111 connecting London and New York, AI 187 connecting Birmingham and Toronto, AI 141 connecting Bombay to New York and also the flight connecting Delhi and Mumbai to Chicago.
The airline authorities have already ordered a probe into the reasons for the delays and expect those accountable to be found in a couple of days, a ministry spokesperson said.
Those accountable will be suspended or punished on the lines of the rule-book already followed by the airline, the spokesperson said.
Meanwhile, Thulasidas while admitting that the airline it was facing shortage of pilots, said in Kochi it was trying to overcome the situation by recruiting them from abroad. Civil aviation minister Praful Patel also told the Rajya Sabha that explosive growth in the sector had indeed led to an acute shortage of pilots in the country.
On Saturday, five West-bound flights of Air India were delayed by as much as 16 hours. The IGI Airport witnessed riotous scenes early on Sunday morning as hundreds of passengers of the delayed flights found themselves stuck for the weekend at the facility-starved international terminal.
While passengers of AI?s Delhi-London-New York and Delhi-Abu Dhabi-Muscat were waiting for their flight from Saturday, they were joined on Sunday by fresh? delays of Birmingham-Toronto, Bangkok-Shanghai and London-NY flights.