Jet to add international capacity, hire foreign pilots

Jet Airways is planning to increase capacity on international routes and induct two Boeing 777s this year. The airline, which earns about 55 per cent of revenue from international operations, has leased five Boeing 777s to Thai Airways; the lease term would end this year.

A senior Jet executive said of the five leased Boeing 777s, the airline would induct two and wet-lease three to Turkish Airlines for a year. Under a wet lease, the aircraft owner provides pilots and crew members and is responsible for the aircraft’s maintenance.

Currently, the airline flies the wide-bodied Boeing 777s on the London and Hong Kong routes from Mumbai and Delhi. It is not known on which routes Jet would deploy the two Boeing 777s on.

Jet’s renewed focus on international routes comes at a time when the company is concluding a stake sale with Etihad Airways. It has sought additional traffic rights for Abu Dhabi (Etihad’s headquarters), Amsterdam, Dubai, Singapore and Hong Kong. It also plans to increase capacity on the Delhi-Abu Dhabi and the Mumbai-Abu Dhabi routes and add new flying points such as Hyderabad, Chennai, Ahmedabad and Bangalore.

Through the last few months, the airline had cut international capacity and withdrawn from loss-making routes, including flights to Johannesburg, Milan and New York; new routes were put on hold. The airline had secured permission to start services to Munich and was negotiating a code-share alliance with Lufthansa. Shifting its European hub from Brussels to Munich was also being considered. However, that plan has been put on hold and Jet is now considering shifting the base to Abu Dhabi.

Now, the airline is planning to hire about 100 foreign pilots for its wide-bodied Boeing fleet. For this, it has already approached several hiring firms, even as the Directorate General of Civil Aviation has set a December 2013 deadline for phasing out expatriate pilots. After the company’s results for the quarter ended September were announced, K G Vishwanath, Jet’s senior vice-president for investor relations, had told analysts, “By March 2013, we will reduce (the number of expatriate pilots) from 107 to 59. As of March end 2012, we had 207 expat pilots.”

According to a Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation report, through the next 12-18 months, the number of aircraft in Jet’s wide-bodied fleet is expected to rise from 18 to about 30. This, however, is largely dependent on the airline’s network plan once the Etihad deal is signed.

For the quarter ended December, the airline had recorded a profit of Rs 93 crore, against a loss of Rs 122 crore in the corresponding period a year ago.