Meet To Spruce Up Air India'S Image

Civil aviation ministry sources said the meeting scheduled for September 13 here will be addressed by Ibrahim.

Senior ministry and Air India officials would participate.

Ever since Ibrahim took over the reigns of civil aviation ministry about three months ago, he had been expressing concern over the declining image of the national carrier and losses being suffered by the airline. He was keen to have a total professional outlook even at the general sales agent's level and people not connected with aviation trade should be relieved of this lucrative GSA's business.

About two months ago, when the minister had reviewed the performance of Air India, he had made it abundantly clear that all decisions of the airlines should be based on commercial point of view and if the performance of any unit was found to be lacking of enterprise, their cases should be reviewed immediately.

 

The ministry felt there were general sales agents's who had been functioning on day-to-day basis and the effort was to regularise the working of GSA centres like Toronto, London, Jeddah and other key positions in West Asia and Europe.

The department of civil aviation was also reported to be disturbed over the cases of bankruptcy in certain western countries and West Asia.

After the review performance with the minister, the airline had tightened control over stocklifting of tickets by IATA agents and had asked for sufficient security before providing ticket stocks.

Defaulting agents had been served notices only to function as cash and carry vendors.

Brijesh Kumar, the airline's managing director, has been taking steps from time to time to introduce modern fail safe systems to monitor and exercise better control in order to protect and increase its marketing share.

Observers say the recent step in decreasing the air fare from Delhi-London and Mumbai-London had not only increased the yield but had also made the airlines flights popular.

The termination of the caribjet contract, under which the European-based leasing company had wetleased four aircraft to Air India was another step to save foreign exchange and to utilise its own fleet. Air India had terminated the wetlease of caribjet following complaints from DGCA for the alleged technical deficiencies discovered in the aircraft. The airline was criticised by the Comptroller of audit-general as it had lost a huge amount of money due to wetleasing of the aircraft.