Bookings up 30 percent as Jet resumes normal operations

Bookings for domestic and international flights on private carrier Jet Airways went up nearly 30% since the airline returned to normal operations. The carrier, which cancelled over 400 flights in the past five days following mass sick leave by its pilots, is back in the skies with bookings in full swing.

An official from Jet's revenue department said, "We had a decent number of seat bookings by passengers on our domestic network on Monday. In a day or two, we hope to touch our regular mark of getting over 23,000 passengers to fly with us." Jet's passenger figures declined to 14,000 in the first two days due to the mass protest by pilots on September 8 and in the last two days, the bookings dropped to7,000

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Pilot stir could hit Jet's fund-raising plan

Fund raising plans of private carrier Jet Airways may hit a roadblock because of the ongoing tussle between pilots and management over re-instatement of two senior pilots who were allegedly instrumental in forming National Aviators Guild (NAG), the 650 pilots strong union. Jet had previously on multiple occasions deferred plans to raise additional capital to the tune of $400 million, that was approved by the company's board due to volatile market conditions. The ongoing mass protests of pilots could also impact investor sentiments say financial planners. The carrier posted Rs 225 crore net loss for the quarter ended June 30, 2009 and has been in discussion with investment banks to raise funds by the end of the year. To add fuel to fire, the airline is also loosing out on market share which would disrupt its biggest fund-raising plan. Jet stock fell 3.54% on Thursday to close at Rs 253.25 on the Bombay Stock Exchange.

Meanwhile, despite facing a legal notice from Bombay High Court on contempt of court against Jet Airways pilots for halting work, the mass protest leading to a strike entered its third day on Thursday. NAG is likely to meet the labour commissioner on Friday to discuss the veracity of the issue.

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Air India won't get Rs 15,000 crore bailout

The government has indicated that a bailout package for the crisis-ridden Air India will not be possible beyond $1-1.5 billion (Rs 5,000-5,500 crore) against the $3 billion sought by the airline. A hectic reworking of the capital restructuring possibilities is underway and is expected to be submitted by June 22.

“An equity infusion of up to Rs 1,500 crore, plus a soft loan of Rs 3,000-3,500 crore will be considered on a priority basis. There is no chance of the Airline receiving a package of Rs 14,000 to 15,000-crore package,” a very senior source in the civil aviation ministrty said. “In fact, the civil aviation ministry and Air India are currently involved in the preparation of exact details and a package. It is expected to be submitted around June 22 and thereafter the government will take a final decision,” top government sources told FE on Sunday on the condition of anonymity.

On Saturday, the civil aviation ministry held initial discussions in this regard with the National Aviation Company of India Ltd (Nacil), created through Air India-Indian Airlines merger in 2007.

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Jet Airways set to ground expat pilots

The country’s largest private carrier Jet Airways has plans to phase out most of its expatriate pilots and not fill other vacant positions in the coming months as part of cost cutting moves. Jet, which had posted Q3 losses of Rs 214 crore, had announced in September 2008 that it would undertake a slew of cost cutting measures to keep the company afloat in testing times.

The move to trim foreign pilots comes at a time when the airline, which recently had a strategic alliance with its archrival Kingfisher Airline, is in the process of rationalising routes on its domestic and international network.

According to sources, the airline had a board meeting on Monday where decision to trim foreign pilot headcount was taken. The airline has nearly 1,300 pilots of which 250 are expats.

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Flying high in testing times

In the aviation industry, characterised by intense competition and high cost structures, streamlining every aspect of operations to bring in efficiencies is a high priority. Improving management's visibility to operational and business performance is imperative to achieve this. It was this objective that drove Jet Airways to conduct a business process reengineering exercise and reimplement core backend modules of SAP and extend its footprint simultaneously. Jet Airways caters to both domestic and international routes.

The main challenge lay in improving business visibility and reducing delays in MIS. Project E3 (it stands for efficiency, empowerment and effectiveness) was executed to deliver information regarding the performance of all routes/flights flown by the airline taking into account the revenues and various costs incurred to the top management. It works by intricately integrating critical information into data models from various core modules of SAP and an in-house developed module for cost and revenue accounting system.

Jet Airways has an in house applications module for revenue accounting system and costing developed using FoxPro, which was outside the SAP environment. Related reports or MIS had to be manually fed into the SAP systems, which was integrated with FICO and Business Warehouse (BW) to generate MIS reports. RN Moorthy, senior general manager (IT), Jet Airways says, "We had to cull out the data from our legacy applications, feed it into R/3 and do budgeting to produce MIS reports. There was a lot of time delay in reconciling the data from disparate systems and it was error prone as it required manual intervention." He adds, "The delay could be anywhere between a week to ten days after the closure of the week. Our people had to burn midnight oil to dig into the reports; it was taxing on our bottom line."

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