Vistara Is Working On Plans For May And Beyond, Says CEO In A Letter To Employees

Vistara is working on plans for May 2024 and beyond, said Vinod Kannan, chief executive officer of Vistara in a letter to employees. After the recent disruptions in flight operations, the CEO said that it has been a challenging start to the new financial year.

"As you are no doubt aware, we faced significant operational disruption from 31 March to 2 April. The anxiety and frustration felt by our customers was matched in even measure to the pain that all of us felt in seeing our much-loved brand drawing negative commentary from various quarters," he wrote.

However, most of the operations have stabilised with on-time performance increasing to 89% on April 9, he said.

The development comes at a time when several flight delays and cancellations due to Vistara crew unavailability created chaos. NDTV Profit previously reported that this was because pilots sought sick leaves all at once, due to a revised salary system the airline was trying to implement ahead of its merger with Air India.

Discussing that, CEO said that things like stretched pilot rosters, ATC delays, bird hits and maintenance activities were the reasons behind this chaos.

"We were stretched in our pilot rosters and there was not enough resilience to withstand injects that we would otherwise have weathered," he wrote.

Thanking all the pilots, front-line staff and customer-facing teams, Kannan said that they are working with the relevant teams to introduce more resilience.

While Vistara has scaled back operations by around 25-30 flights per day, as reported before, they are working on further plans for May as well. They have also reached out to customers to provide relevant compensation.

Highlighting the positives, the CEO said that Vistara has also completed its order book after taking the delivery of its 70th aircraft, Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner.

In addition, it also inaugurated operations on BOM-CDG route, a non-stop long haul route between India and Europe.