NEW DELHI: Call it the IndiGo schedule collapse or its fallout impact. A clamour has broken out between the budget airline and Air India group over having adequate captains to avoid a repeat of what happened under the new safety-enhancing flight duty time limitation (FDTL) rules.IndiGo has had to commit to DGCA about hiring pilots – it’ll induct 100 in Jan itself – and AI has already come out with an ad for getting more aviators on board. But both airlines are also facing a significant number of captain resignations – with some leaving one for the other and mostly for joining foreign carriers.So, the hiring is also to ensure they don’t go below their current numbers, which has made the scramble more intense than anything seen before in Indian skies.For once, their balance sheet-centric human resource departments are on the back foot and can’t oppose sprucing of ranks after what happened earlier this month. A senior officer of one of the two big Indian carriers claimed its captains are already getting “calls with joining bonus of upto Rs 50 lakh”.“Where do we get captains from? Under the new FDTL, experienced pilots’ availability will become acute. There will be a lot of poaching from each other,” said a senior airline officer. A few years ago, said a senior pilot, IndiGo had offered a joining bonus to experienced aviators to join which would take care of the bond payment, if any, needed to be paid to the airline they were resigning from. “This was in the range of Rs 15 lakh to Rs 25 lakh to take care of the bond, which back then was somewhere between Rs 5 and 15 lakh,” the pilot said.
