Vistara asserts ‘over 98%’ pilots signed new contracts after sizeable number said to have rejected pay terms

Vistara pilots resist new pay structure, raising safety concerns amid merger with Air India, leading to disruptions.

Vistara’s CEO Vinod Kannan on Saturday asserted that “over 98% of pilots” had signed new contracts entailing a new pay structure, which has been cited by industry sources as a key issue that had led to a spate of recent flight cancellations and delays at the full service airline that is set to merge with the Tata Group’s Air India. The industry sources, however, contended that the number of Vistara pilots who had not accepted the new pay structure announced in mid-February were far more in number than the airline was publicly admitting.

“Over 98% of pilots have signed the new contract,” Mr. Kannan said in an e-mailed statement to The Hindu. “Having said that, we are aware that some pilots have some concerns and queries regarding the contract. We are engaging with them to clarify and resolve the same,” he stated, adding that this had, however, ‘not caused any visible spike in attrition’ among pilots.

The CEO, who had held a town hall with pilots on April 4 to address their concerns after the airline was forced to cancel 150 flights and suffer delays to more than 200 other flights in the preceding three to four days, is reported to have told participants at that event that 270 pilots had not signed the contract, according to multiple people who had participated at the online meeting and spoke on the condition of anonymity given the sensitivity of the issue.

This would imply that almost a fourth of Vistara’s total cockpit crew were opposed to the terms of the new contract, which cuts the guaranteed minimum flying allowance from 70 hours to 40 hours resulting in a monthly pay cut of ₹80,000 to ₹1.4 lakh for First Officers (FOs or junior pilots). The airline has more than 1,100 pilots on its rolls.

Acknowledging the gravity of the recent disruptions to the airline’s flight schedules and its impact on customers, Mr. Kannan said in the statement, “In the light of the recent disruptions in our network owing to various operational reasons, we acknowledge and are deeply concerned about the inconvenience this has caused to our customers”.

“We are addressing this on a war footing... we are continuing to hire more pilots and are also carefully scaling back our operations slightly to provide the much needed resilience, and a buffer in the rosters. We have also deployed larger aircraft like our B787-9 Dreamliner and A321neo aircraft on select domestic routes to accommodate more customers, wherever possible,” he observed, adding that the airline hoped to stabilise operations “by this weekend”.

Industry sources said discontentment among pilots over various issues, including taxing flight schedules, delay in upgrades for FOs to the post of Pilot-in-Command had been brewing for a while, resulting in resignations that had precipitated the disruptions and coincided with the announcement of the new pay structure two months ago. This had particularly angered the FOs, they added.