Has SpiceJet’s Ajay Singh lost his turnaround touch?

The low-cost carrier is in all kinds of trouble with lessors and debtors. It will take all of its promoter’s substantial good offices with the government and more to keep it afloat.

The senior airline executives, assembled at the Ministry of Civil Aviation for a meeting with bureaucrats, were aghast. Here was SpiceJet being thanked despite showing a blatant disregard for orders issued by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation, the regulator. 

It was mid-March 2019. The aviation world was still reeling from the shock of twin air tragedies involving Boeing 737 Max aircraft. In fact, the second one, involving an Ethiopian Airlines flight which crashed killing 157 people, had happened just a few days before, on 10 March. Like aviation regulators  around the world, the DGCA too grounded the aircraft in …

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Prince M. Thomas

Prince leads the newsroom at The Morning Context as managing editor. A fascination with the written word has taken Prince to some of the leading newsrooms across the country, including The Economic Times, Dow Jones Newswires, Forbes India and Moneycontrol. In a career spanning 20 years, Prince has led teams, managed pages, projects and special editions, and has authored The Consolidators, published by Penguin Random House in 2017.

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