Why IndiGo is struggling to find pilots

Budget carrier IndiGo, which controls more than 40 per cent of the domestic market in India, is struggling with shortage of pilots. Though the problem came to light in the past week when the airline cancelled hundreds of flights, in the last one and a half months alone, as many as 1,200 of its scheduled flights have been cancelled due to crew shortages and pilots reporting sick. IndiGo said last week that scheduled cancellations of 30 flights every day would continue till March 31. Its crew addition has lagged its aggressive capacity addition. It plans to hire more than 100 expatriate pilots this year to add to its roster of flight captains. According to an ET Prime report, one reason behind IndiGo's pilot trouble is inefficient rostering.How the software challenge emergedIt all started around two years ago when the airline brought in expat managers to handle its expanded fleet. It now has a fleet of 209 aircraft, more than double the 100 it flew in 2015.But planes need pilots to fly. IndiGo’s pilots are paid to fly 70 hours a month, around 840 hours a year, but they were only doing around 700 hours then, or about 60 hours a month or sometimes even less. Now, Indian regulations allow pilots to fly 1,000 hours a year. So, the expat team decided that pilot productivity needed to go up, since they are an expensive resource, taking home between Rs 4 lakh and Rs 6 lakh a month.To achieve this target, the new team did many experiments. For one, software was upgraded. So, millions of dollars were spent on software packages for optimising crew rostering. It was intended to ensure that the expanded fleet could be run with the same number of pilots. The new flying patternsIn the first five years of its operations, the airline used Sabre-made crew-rostering software. Then it decided to bring in AIMS crew-management software, then moved to AD OPT, and then to Jeppesen crew-scheduling system.The new software came up with new flying patterns for the crew. While in the earlier flying pattern most pilots would do around four or five sectors a day on the same plane, the new scheduling increased the number of routes, sometimes on more than one plane. It would force pilots to wait for long hours at airports between switching aircraft, something they loathed, as IndiGo didn’t want to spend on layover bases.How it impacted lives of pilots The new rostering kept pilots away from their home base for four to five days at a stretch. It affected their personal lives, leading to rising disaffection. “There are a few divorce cases too now,” an IndiGo pilot told ET Prime. “One wife even contacted the airline, asking why her husband is never home. We told her it’s not our problem.”Wolfgang Prock-Schauer, IndiGo’s chief operating officer, declined to comment on why so many new software were brought in, but says the latest one was required because “no human brain” can make so many flying patterns. He agrees that the software can sometimes come up with schedules which pilots don’t like, as they keep them away from their base, but adds that the airline is trying to address the problem. How the new rostering backfiredWhile in the earlier flying pattern most pilots would do flight rotation on the same plane, now they had to switch planes. For a flight rotation like Delhi-Mumbai-Guwahati-Delhi, the pilot would do the Delhi-Mumbai-Guwahati leg on the same plane, then wait at the airport and switch to another incoming plane for the Guwahati-Delhi flight. But planes don’t always arrive on time. If the plane was delayed, the pilot on duty for around eight hours would recuse himself from flying further as his duty timings were over. Now, a new crew was needed in the middle of nowhere, while the previous team flew back as passengers or, most likely, on the jump seat of the plane.Not the right plan for the short haul IndiGo’s plans to have extremely high pilot utilisation was also impractical, given that it has flights of only one and a half hour on average. While utilisation of 900-1,000 hours is quite common on international flights, it’s difficult to achieve in short-haul flights with multiple landings and take-offs.Disgruntled pilotsDisgruntled pilots even thought of forming a union late last year and had created a dedicated WhatsApp group towards that objective, forcing the management to react. Ashim Mittra, senior vice-president of flight operations at IndiGo, assured pilots around December in a bid to diffuse tensions. He also formed a committee to look into the rostering grievances. To be sure, IndiGo had kept its pilots happy in 2017-18 through large-scale promotions — some 700 pilots were promoted from first officers to senior first officers and captains to trainers — but is now running out of ideas. Since then attrition has shot up — cabin-crew attrition, which was controlled at 14%, has shot up to around 20%, while pilot attrition of 4% is now at around 10%.IndiGo has never had a union so far because in the past it had weekly dialogues with pilots to iron out issues. That process largely ended with the new expat team taking over.

from Economic Times http://bit.ly/2tq7DVs
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