With bloated staff numbers, soaring debt levels, and a multitude of more nimble rivals in the skies, Air India (AI) continues to face a bumpy ride in its efforts to improve its fortunes.
The loss-making state-owned flag carrier is guzzling hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money every year.
“Air India’s outlook is bleak,” says Saj Ahmad, the chief analyst at StrategicAero Research. “You cannot use ‘profit’ and ‘Air India’ in the same sentence. It simply is never going to happen while the airline remains in its current messy state. You have more chance of finding a dodo alive than you do of seeing Air India becoming a well-to-do airline. It would take years and billions of rupees to overhaul this dinosaur. The sad reality is that Air India cannot be saved. It has passed the point of no return.”
The carrier is expected to post a loss of 39 billion rupees (Dh2.31bn) in the current financial year, which runs until the end of March. These results would actually be a significant improvement on the previous year, when AI reported a loss of 52bn rupees compared with a loss of more than 75bn rupees the year before that. The airline’s debts amount to 350bn rupees. AI has some 24,000 permanent employees, meaning that it has one of the highest numbers of workers per aircraft of any airline in the world.
15/02/14 Rebecca Bundhun/The National
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The loss-making state-owned flag carrier is guzzling hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money every year.
“Air India’s outlook is bleak,” says Saj Ahmad, the chief analyst at StrategicAero Research. “You cannot use ‘profit’ and ‘Air India’ in the same sentence. It simply is never going to happen while the airline remains in its current messy state. You have more chance of finding a dodo alive than you do of seeing Air India becoming a well-to-do airline. It would take years and billions of rupees to overhaul this dinosaur. The sad reality is that Air India cannot be saved. It has passed the point of no return.”
The carrier is expected to post a loss of 39 billion rupees (Dh2.31bn) in the current financial year, which runs until the end of March. These results would actually be a significant improvement on the previous year, when AI reported a loss of 52bn rupees compared with a loss of more than 75bn rupees the year before that. The airline’s debts amount to 350bn rupees. AI has some 24,000 permanent employees, meaning that it has one of the highest numbers of workers per aircraft of any airline in the world.
15/02/14 Rebecca Bundhun/The National
