Vistara blames rostering for flight disruptions, warns of curtailed ops till May

livemint.com:

NEW DELHI : Vistara has blamed poor rostering for a wave of flight cancellations at the full-service carrier, warning it may have to curtail its network for May as well to gradually stabilize operations, two people aware of the development told Mint. Chief executive officer Vinod Kannan addressed Vistara's pilots on Wednesday following a string of flight delays and cancellations that left thousands of passengers stranded. Over the last two days, more than 100 flights of the airline have been cancelled and a large number of flights have faced delays, as disgruntled pilots have called in sick en masse.

"It was a short meeting of about 20 minutes. The airline showed a poor planning for redundancies, especially for the month of March, and this left the network in a chaos after a large number of unplanned sick leaves were reported," one of the people cited above said. The Delhi-based airline bore the brunt of poor crew rostering - a process of workload distribution - following a large number of unplanned sick leave, as there were just not enough pilots to back up and the existing lot were already stretched to their limits, he added.

Queries sent to Vistara remained unanswered till press time. Vistara is being merged with Air India, and the Tata Group that owns the two carriers is seeking to implement a uniform pay structure, which effectively reduces the salaries of Vistara pilots by bringing them at par with Air India. Under the new pay structure that's already followed at Air India, the pilots of Vistara get a fixed salary for 40 hours, instead of 70 hours earlier.