Hopes crashland: 2 foreign pilots leave India

Chennai: Carrying bitter memories of India, two foreign pilots left Chennai on Monday for their respective countries. While Capt Juan Carlos Vesga from Colombia had relocated to this city along with his wife and two daughters in 2008, Capt Leonardo Reichlin had chucked a job with Copa Airlines in his home country, Panama, and come down to Chennai in February this year.
Last week, eight other pilots from Colombia and Panama, left Chennai - some of them with their families - after waging a losing battle with their management, which terminated their contracts suddenly. All the expat pilots, trained in flying Embraer aircraft, accused their employer of not paying salaries and other dues for the last couple of months, though the airline spokesman categorically said they had no business staying in India as their contracts had expired.
For their part, the pilots argued that their contracts were signed in 2008 and beyond and were valid for three years. Though there is a clause that the contract was renewable every year with mutual consent, the pilots claimed that their consent was not taken before terminating it. If the company was to terminate the contract unilaterally, it would have to pay the salary for the two-month notice period, which was not done, the pilots said.
Even after their names were taken off the roster, the pilots stayed back in Chennai in a bid to get their dues from the company. Two weeks ago, they barged into the airline office with their families. But the company called in the police. They wrote to their respective embassies seeking their intervention. Colombian Ambassador Juan Alfredo Pinto Saveedra wrote to the Deputy Chief Labour Commissioner in Chennai, V J Mathew, urging him to sort out the matter, and marked a copy of the letter to the International Labour Office for South Asia.
The pilots, as a group, met some members of the media and poured out their grief. Vesga said he had to sell the furniture at home to make both ends meet. Some of them claimed that since the management did not pay their house rent, they were under tremendous pressure from the landlords. Capt Hector Pachon claimed that he had to pay rent from his pocket for four months to keep the landlord at bay.
11/05/10 Mamta Todi/ExpressBuzz

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Categories: Foreign May 2010, Paramount Airways May 2010