The travails of becoming a pilot in India

Pilots in India and their travails; trainee pilots have to repay exorbitant loans and wait for long periods

“I have leapt off a cliff. I can either grow wings or crash.” This is how a young trainee pilot describes his predicament after spending five years and ₹1.07 crore on learning how to fly, along with a steep employment bond of ₹50 lakh which locks him in for five years with the country’s biggest airline, IndiGo.

In his early 20s, Aravinth Nair* has already witnessed the cyclical and volatile nature of the aviation industry in his fledgling career. First, there was the closure of Jet Airways in 2019 just when he was preparing to embark on his flight training programme after finishing high school. That was followed by COVID-19 the next year when his training was temporarily suspended, even as the spectre of mounting interest on the loan incurred to pay his flying school fee loomed large. Then came the Go First closure in May 2023 that flooded the market with jobless but experienced pilots and delayed his induction at the airline, resulting in an extended wait before he could start repaying his loan. These are just some of the stressors that, unknown to most, hide behind the sheen of a “fat” pay cheque.

Add to this, the unpredictable training timelines that can stretch for up to four years before one can even land an airline job, and the loans incurred to pay exorbitant flight training fees ranging between ₹80 lakh and ₹1.2 crore that can take 10 to 14 years to repay. Pilots also find themselves tethered by “illegal” employment bonds of ₹20 lakh for Vistara or ₹50 lakh for IndiGo in the form of undated cheques, locking them in with the company for a period of two to five years at a fixed salary lower than prevalent market standards. Air India too requires new joinees to furnish a bank guarantee of ₹25 lakh for five years, for which pilots often pledge their fixed deposits or incur loans. These bonds or bank guarantees are in addition to costs borne by pilots for induction training of six to nine months at airlines; at Air India, this costs ₹14 lakh, while Vistara charges ₹12 lakh.

There is also the bureaucratic red tape that can mean three months to clear medical assessments and at least a two-month wait just to be issued a licence by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation. Such factors have a cascading impact on a pilot’s career as these delays could cause other permits to lapse even before one has secured a job.

The multiple challenges involved in becoming a pilot in India today is also at the heart of the current unrest at Vistara. The airline’s junior pilots have strongly objected to a revised salary structure announced in mid-February which offers them a guaranteed flying allowance for 40 hours instead of the current 70 hours, resulting in a pay cut of 24% to 40% on a salary of ₹3.4 lakh per month. However, many find themselves, as one Vistara First Officer described, “caught in a chokehold” and unable to leave.

“Nothing went off as I had expected. Because there is unpredictability over jobs, I opted for IndiGo’s cadet training programme that cost me ₹1.07 crore five years ago but guaranteed a job at the airline. I paid a premium for a well-known brand and a complete end-to-end package that I hoped would also take care of complex and lengthy regulatory requirements,” recounts Mr. Nair, who is now a First Officer at IndiGo. But that’s not what happened, and the training itself took four years to complete instead of two.

Once he finished his training and joined IndiGo, the induction training for freshers like him was also delayed by four to five months as the airline hired 200 trained pilots from Go First after the latter shut operations.