This is good for both IC and for the pilots. IC has to get it's crew happy, given their upcoming deliveries of the 320 family!

wage inflation is unhealthy for airlines in India, guess these airlines have a plan to counter this. There is this fear of lowering minimum qualification standards too. I hope there is a improvement in the quality of trainee crew. During the late 80s as a student pilot in nagpur one would meet only 2 types of student pilots

1) NCC cadets using defense credits to fly, more or less these guys were qualified in PCM (physics, Chemistry & Maths), pursuing a science stream degree, with plenty of common sense.

2)Rich-rich school drop-out children of politicians, traders and AI / IA capts. One such girl was the daughter of a IA ops director. The flying instructor was always worried about this girl, she managed to complete her flying and secure a job in AI, this is early 90s. Due to closure of the flying school i had to move on and started with AI as a mechanic. Later in the late 90s, one day, while i was in the flt deck of an aircraft at a hub airport in Middle-east doing my paper work as a engineer, had the radio on tower frequency listening to the usual chatter. Suddenly heard the tower going ballastic at an AI Airbus that took-off straight into an on coming cathay B747 freighter, apparently the tower/grd had asked the AI Airbus to hold position till clear for take-off. The AI commander apologiesed on behalf of the Pilot doing the take-off that day, the tower was insistant on knowing the name of the pilot, guess what it was her begs a question, what was the captain doing ? 

Which group did i belong to probably the second, I would count myself as one of the numties but pennyless, i was selling computers to pay for my flying, post a diploma in Mechanical engineering.

www.pprune.org is a global chat room for ops crew, it has a forum on south-asia, its amusing reading some of the posts there, well as the site says it is a rumour network so take it with loads of salt. 

-- Edited by tayara mechanici at 15:10, 2006-07-21

Why is it that only AI or IA pilots and commanders take all the flak, i have colleagues who're in Jet who're taking the fat packet and doing a shoddy job as well. There are people who've joined KF in the morning, took an interview with DN in the afternoon and accepted an offer from G8 in the evening. The situation is more severe with 320 commanders than it is with f/o's. 

tayara, an average commander in IC has over 6500hrs. Most of the 93 pilots have touched command, one of the guys is 28 and he has over 8000hrs. He just got poached by G8 a couple of weeks ago. On an average IC has better aircrafts today than it has ever had. The maintenance has picked up, and the post flight checks are now taken very seriously.

as a commander today, most of us are on cieling between 950-980 hours. Can you tell me one Jet or any other airline capt who're clocking this? The airline is heavily focussed on shift more and more people from the right, so the borderline cases of 3800hrs are being flown like dogs to make sure they cross the magic number and move to the left. Now IC knows this perfectly well that these guys are ripe targets for being poached, but still goes and does this. I have friends in Sahara and Jet who're can move to the left in about 200hrs and the airline is grounding them for the fear of having them poached. In the last ops meeting all commanders have been told to give more flying to the senior f/o's, so while in the past it used to be our discretion to fly, its now unwritten that if we have a senior f/o we let him fly, we do the announcements And my hindi is getting better. "Humara viman dhwani ke gati se pichyasi pratishat ke tezi se ud raha hai" BEAT THAT.

Does this justify the returns in IC? I think it does. Besides, KF has an open 2Cr bank guarantee for 5yrs for commanders. Now that is temptation hard to resist, the airlines have to pay higher to keep the guys from jumping.

Hope this didn't sound very defensive, but on the overall i think IC is a better place to work today than it was 5 yrs ago. Its getting pretty professional, and i can say that having been here since 94.

namoshkar karatecatman....... YAIEEEEEEEEEHAAAAAAAAAAAAWW (that was me trying to take out the sound of the karate kick)