Cockpit and cabin crew suffer as fresh Covid wave hits air travel

Tejas Dodia, a senior cabin crew member with Jet Airways, was one of the thousands of employees who lost their job after the airline was grounded in April 2019. He began applying for cabin crew positions but found none. At Air India, for instance, the cut-off age (35) for cabin crew rendered Dodia, 36, ineligible. Frustrated at sitting at home for months despite his work experience, he turned an entrepreneur. He now runs “Rasoighar”, cooking and delivering home food.
 
Dodia is not alone in flying out of the aviation business altogether. There were nearly 4,000 cabin crew with Jet when the airline was grounded; every fifth remains without a job to date. One cabin crew member with 10 years of experience has been forced to take up a teaching job; some have branched out into small businesses.
 
Aviation jobs were scarce even before the Covid-19 pandemic arrived on Indian shores in early 2020. The situation has been exacerbated since. Initially, all flights were grounded and even when operations resumed, only a part of the capacity of each airline was allowed. Thousands of people working as cockpit crew, cabin crew, airport staff and in ground handling services have lost their livelihoods in the aftermath of the pandemic. Those who remain have faced severe pay cuts. The government had acknowledged in Parliament that between April and September last year, nearly 40,000 aviation jobs had vanished.
 
Not just cabin crew, the single most critical job function in the aviation sector — cockpit crew — is also in peril. “Aap to laakhon mein kamate ho, salary kuchh kam ho gayi to kya hua (you earn in lakhs, so what if the salary has been reduced a little?)” — a senior commander with three decades of flying with an Indian airline was told to grin and bear the nearly
 
75 per cent cut in gross salary his airline implemented last summer. So, if a pilot from the airline was earning nearly Rs  2 lakh a month before the pandemic, she was asked to subsist on about Rs 50,000. Across the country, commanders and first officers were faced with a sudden and significant reduction in income, forcing some to delay regular EMI payments for home loans and others to tighten the budget for daily-use items.
 
Almost a year has gone by and salaries of the cockpit and cabin crew have not been restored, and jobs are still hard to come by in both domestic and international markets. The situation had started improving over the last few months, as the Ministry of Civil Aviation allowed more flights, and some jobs, too, had begun opening up. But with the second, more lethal Covid-19 wave upon us, passenger numbers have dropped alarmingly and more aviation jobs are in jeopardy.