Vistara Airlines on Sunday said that they were scaling back their operations by about 25 to 30 flights every day, which makes up to about 10 per cent of their current capacity. 

The airlines cited that the flight cancellations and delays, which have been occurring for the past few days causing significant disturbance to numerous passengers, were being done to minimise the inconvenience to their customers.

In a statement, a Vistara spokesperson said, “We are carefully scaling back our operations by around 25-30 flights per day, i.e. roughly 10% of the capacity we were operating. This will take us back to the same level of flight operations as at the end of February 2024, and provide the much-needed resilience and buffer in the rosters. These cancellations are done mostly in our domestic network and much ahead of time to minimise inconvenience to the customers.”

It further read that all the “affected passengers” had been assigned other flights and all the changes were already in place.

“Also, all the affected passengers have already been re-accommodated on other flights, as applicable. In line with what we had said earlier, with this all the changes for the month of April 2024 have been done and the situation has already gotten better with our on-time performance improving for the last few days. Looking ahead, we are hopeful of stable operations for the rest of the month and beyond,” the spokesperson said.

On Saturday, Vistara CEO Vinod Kannan apologised for the flight delays and cancellations taking place for the last few days.

In a statement, Kannan said, “We would like to again clarify that these disruptions were due to the cascading effect of a multitude of factors. While we do have adequate crew for normal operations, since we have been operating on a high utilisation, we were challenged due to operational disruption.”

“Having said that, we acknowledge the inconvenience this has caused to our customers and sincerely apologise to them for the same,” he added.

Kannan further said that 98 per cent of the pilots have signed the new contract. However, he acknowledged that some pilots have expressed concerns and queries regarding the terms of the agreement. “We are engaging with them to clarify and resolve the same. However, this has not caused any visible spike in attrition amongst pilots,” he added.

The Tata Group’s airline cancelled a significant number of flights earlier this week due to a shortage of available pilots. This disruption forced the carrier to temporarily scale back its overall flight operations in an effort to stabilise the situation. Over the course of three days starting from April 1, Vistara was compelled to cancel more than 125 flights as it grappled with the lack of sufficient pilot resources to maintain its regular schedule.

Amid Vistara’s merger with Air India, the pilots are protesting against the revised contracts. As per reports, under the new agreement between the two airlines, the junior co-pilots will see a salary cut from ₹2.35 lakh per month to ₹1.88 lakh per month since the mandated flying hours will go down from 70 to 40.

In the meantime, both of Air India’s pilot unions, the Indian Pilots Guild (representing Boeing pilots) and the Indian Commercial Pilots Guild (representing Airbus pilots), penned a letter to N. Chandrasekaran, the Chairman of the Tata Group, on Thursday. They requested the Tata Group to engage in discussions with pilots and resolve the issues highlighted by Vistara pilots.