Hundreds of cancelled and delayed flights cannot really be pinned on ‘unavailability of crew’. Rather, it is a chronic shortage of pilots as well as sloppy training and HR practices at the Tata-SIA airline that is to blame.
It didn’t take much for things to go haywire at Vistara.
By Tuesday morning, over 100 flights had either been cancelled or delayed. There were a litany of complaints from irate customers on social media platforms. The chaos prompted the Ministry of Civil Aviation to ask Vistara for an explanation.
In its response, the airline, a Tata Sons-Singapore Airlines joint venture, cited operational reasons, including “unavailability of crew”, for the mess. Eventually, it curtailed its flight schedule.
The admission of crew unavailability prompted many to wonder if the airline’s pilots had resorted to calling in sick en masse in protest …
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.
Managing Editor
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