Flying solo

On September 13, 2009, a few hours after the six-day-long agitation was called off by the pilots at Jet Airways, Naresh Goyal held out an olive branch. In an attempt to bury the hatchet and tell each other “let bygones be bygones,” Goyal, chairman of India’s largest airline, invited 200-odd pilots to join him for high tea at a five-star hotel near Mumbai International airport. But there’s a thing or two about relationships. They’re awfully fragile. And when fractured once, the demons are incredibly difficult to exorcise.
Which is why, when the pilots reached the venue and discovered Capt. Hameed Ali, who is chief operating officer (COO), Declan Conolley, vice-president (VP) flight operations and Capt. Hassan Al-Mousawi, senior VP-operations and on-time performance, already seated in the conference hall, they flew into a fit of rage. Never mind everything else you’ve heard about why they agitated in the first place. Call it xenophobia, call it imagined anguish, or call it real anger — to everybody’s embarrassment, not a single pilot would enter the hall until the expats in the room left.
Their gripe? That they take home $7,200 a month and are expected to fly 22 days during the time. Their expatriate counterparts, on the other hand, are paid $12,000 a month with taxes being picked up by the company; fly 12 days, take 10 days off when they get business class tickets to go home. This, the Indians argued, was discrimination. Over the last one year, they claimed they had tried their damndest best to reason it out with the three men now accompanying Goyal. If things had come to a boil, they believed the blame had to rest squarely on the shoulders of these managers. Eventually, Goyal conceded ground and the team of negotiators accompanying him left the place and he was left to himself to manage the evening.
05/10/09  Cuckoo Paul/Business.in

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