Air India Works to Restore Normal Schedule After 10-Day Pilot Strike Ends

Air India Ltd. planned to return to regular schedules after pilots ended a 10-day walkout that crippled the state-owned airline’s operations and hindered efforts to regain profitability after four years of losses.

“The effort is now on to normalize operations,” said Kamaljeet Rattan, an Air India spokesman, in a telephone interview yesterday. “The pilots will return to work immediately.”

Members of the Indian Commercial Pilots Association, representing Air India employees who once worked at Indian Airlines, started the strike on April 27 to demand pay parity with colleagues. Indian Airlines merged with Air India in 2007.

The pilots’ group will regain the recognition that Air India withdrew after the strike began, Bloomberg UTV reported, citing Civil Aviation Minister Vayalar Ravi. The association members who had been fired after the strike began would also be rehired, the channel reported.

Air India canceled more than 1,000 flights because of the strike, which cost it 200 million rupees ($4.46 million) a day in lost sales, Rattan said. Ticket sales at Kingfisher Airlines Ltd. (KAIR), the nation’s second-largest domestic carrier by market share, rose after the strike, Chief Executive Officer Sanjay Aggarwal said.

The walkout by more than 700 pilots came as Air India held talks with 20 banks on restructuring loans to pare borrowing costs. The debt-reduction plan will need to be reviewed because of strike losses, said Rakesh Sethi, an executive director at Punjab National Bank, one of the carrier’s lenders.

Air India had a loss of 34.5 billion rupees in the first half of the last financial year, Civil Aviation Minister Vayalar Ravi told Parliament in March. That followed a loss of 55.5 billion rupees the previous 12 months, he said.

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