Executive blames airlines for their woes

Indian airlines on Monday admitted having pursued "foolish" policy measures in the past few years, which has landed them in a major financial crisis, as experts asked them to reduce capacity in the coming months so as to become viable again.
"The (Indian) airlines themselves are to be blamed. We are in this state of affairs because of the relatively foolish policies that each one of us have pursued," Jet Airways Executive Director Saroj Dutta said at the Asian Route Development Conference here.
While representatives of Airports Authority of India and Delhi International Airports said there had been a decline in both domestic and international passenger traffic, Kapil Kaul of the Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation (CAPA) asked the airlines to cut capacity 10 to 15 per cent urgently.
All panelists at the session on the impact of the economic crisis on airlines and airports agreed that there was an urgent need to reduce capacity by airlines as the Indian carriers, which accounted for two per cent of the global air traffic, suffered almost one-third of the global losses put together.
Elaborating on the "wrong" moves the Indian legacy carriers made over the past three-four years, the Jet Executive Director said the airlines "did extremely badly" even before it was hit by the financial crisis.
When the sector was liberalised, the air traffic went up. "All of us put in capacity to capitalise on that rise," Dutta said referring to the London-India route and adding that when Jet introduced its flight, the British Airways and Singapore Airlines dropped their fares.
In the domestic market too, the airlines continued to induct aircraft, which led to the yields plummeting and thereby making any recovery "a tough call", Dutta said, adding, "I must submit that the airlines have hurt themselves".
30/03/09 Press Trust of India/NDTV.com

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Categories: Indian Aviation- In General Mar 2009