Air India's Airbus pilots want rostering probe extended to Boeing fleet

A union representing Air India pilots who fly the Airbus fleet has demanded that the probe into the alleged manipulation of the crew rostering system be extended to Boeing pilots. The Chief Vigilance Officer of Air India has ordered a probe against pilots of the airline’s Airbus fleet for tweaking the rostering in order to earn a flying allowance.

“For reasons best known to you, the probe on flying hours, leave and payment is being administered only on a particular fleet. We hope that you will not show bias by collecting data for Airbus fleet alone. We request to extend the probe to Boeing fleet,” Indian Commercial Pilots Association (ICPA) wrote to Arvind Kathpalia, director, operations of the airline.

Air India owns A320 and A321 planes from the Airbus family. Its Boeing fleet includes wide-body planes like 787, 777 and 747 models.

The investigation is about the flying duties of pilots and whether the rosters are being changed at the insistence of some pilots.

The modus operandi of the alleged misconduct is exploiting a rule which mandates that pilots are to be paid for 70 hours of flying per month if they fly a minimum of 40 hours. As reported by Business Standard earlier, one of the pilots would fly 40 hours (and get paid for 70 hours on some pretext or the other. Another would fly 70 hours and an extra 30 hours to make up for the colleague who flew only 40 hours. Hence, he would get paid for 100 hours.

This means that the airline gets 140 hours of flying from two pilots, but pays for 170. It loses out twice over since it pays one pilot for 70 hours (even though he flew only 40 hours) and another for 30 hours’ overtime.

The irregularities, sources say, were carried out with the help of officials of Deputy General Manager level (DGM) level.

An Airbus A320 pilot of Air India said that the mismanagement happened due to the inefficiency of the operations department. “In the past, the maximum flying hours of a pilot was restricted to 90 hours per month. The management then felt it was underutilising manpower. Now they feel pilots are flying more. They should make the CMS system more efficient,” he said.