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Jet Airways crisis: A million seats go missing in a month

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NEW DELHI: The grounding of aircraft by Jet Airways has reduced the availability of seats locally by about a million in the past one month, depriving India of the distinction of being the world’s fastest expanding domestic aviation market. Estimated data on the number of seats per month show that domestic availability reduced by 1.3 million from 14.7 million seats in January to 13.4 million in February, primarily due to the grounding of planes by Jet Airways. IndiGo’s flight cancellations due to crew shortage also contributed marginally to the decline in capacity. IndiGo, the country’s biggest carrier, has announced a scheduled cancellation of 30 out of 1,300 daily flights due to shortage of pilots. This reduction in capacity does not include grounding of 12 Boeing 737 MAX by SpiceJet after the regulator’s order in March.

These aircraft were grounded as a precautionary measure after this aircraft type operated by Lion Air and Ethiopian crashed in the past five months. This is the worst-ever capacity reduction in the Indian aviation market, surpassing the grounding of Kingfisher in impact. “At its peak, Kingfisher used to operate a fleet of 69 aircraft, which went out of the system.

This grounding of aircraft as on date is bigger than Kingfisher but the aviation market is holding up, for now,” said a senior official at the aviation regulator. Jet Airways, to date, has grounded 84 aircraft primarily due to non-payment of lease fees to lessors.

SpiceJet had to ground 12 Boeing 737 MAX planes.

The latest capacity reduction has caused fares to rise, also threatening to halt the double-digit passenger growth in the domestic market. Travel analysts say that these reductions have not created as much chaos as expected because of the traditionally lean season. “If this continues, we are looking at a situation where holiday plans of passengers will be impacted badly and the tourism sector will take a hit.

It is not good for Indian aviation at this juncture,” said Sanjay Narula, vice-president at Travel Agents Association of India. Narula added that average fares in the domestic sector have increased by about 35%, but last-minute fares on busy domestic sectors such as Delhi-Mumbai have gone up between 50% and 100%.

The Indian aviation sector is seeing a huge turmoil after a cash crunch hit Jet Airways, which unsuccessfully attempted to cut salaries of pilots in July last year. The employees resisted and the airline had to cancel the plan. The cash crunch led to the airline defaulting on payments to lessors since October last year and the lessors then started to take back planes leading to flight cancellations starting end December.

The carrier now operates a fleet of only 35 out of 119 aircraft at its peak.

Of the 35 aircraft, only 9 are owned by the airline and the rest are leased. “Lessors give 72-hour notice to the airline for lease payment failing which the aircraft is grounded.

This is set to continue as lessors are worried about their payments and the airline may be left with only 9 aircraft,” a DGCA official said, on condition of anonymity.




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