Vistara apologises to passengers for flight cancellations amid pilot unrest

Vistara airline on Friday apologised to passengers for the flight cancellations and delays that have taken place since Monday amid pilot unrest.

"We acknowledge that the recent experience of our customers fell short of the standards that we hold ourselves to, and we sincerely apologise for the same," the airline stated in a social media post.

Describing their situation as akin to "bonded labourers", two Air India pilot unions had voiced their backing for Vistara pilots on Thursday, who have raised grievances regarding the duty roster and the revised salary structure. Vistara is in the process of being merged into Air India.

Vistara stated, "We have had a significant number of flight cancellations and delays owing to various operational reasons and due to high utilisation of resources (pilots), there was limited room to cope with contingencies."

Since Monday, Vistara has been compelled to cancel over 150 flights, allegedly due to a specific group of pilots taking sudden sick leave at the end of March to indicate their dissatisfaction with the roster as well as the new salary structure. It typically operates about 350 flights daily.

"The situation has already improved, with our on-time performance increasing to over 80 per cent for the last two days. We hope to stabilise our operations for the rest of April by this weekend," the airline noted.

"We are addressing this on a war footing. First and foremost, we have temporarily reduced the number of flights we operate and also deployed larger aircraft like our B787-9 Dreamliner and A321neo on select domestic routes to accommodate more customers, wherever possible. Furthermore, we are reaching out to all customers affected by the delays and cancellations over the last weekend, to offer relevant refunds and compensation," it mentioned.