{"id":1045,"date":"2009-10-16T09:42:00","date_gmt":"2009-10-16T09:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/indianaviationnews.net\/avicareers\/?p=1045"},"modified":"2009-10-16T09:42:00","modified_gmt":"2009-10-16T09:42:00","slug":"airline-staffers-dreams-come-crashing-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.indianaviationnews.net\/careers\/2009\/10\/airline-staffers-dreams-come-crashing-down.html","title":{"rendered":"Airline staffers&#039; dreams come crashing down"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: rgb(153, 0, 0);\">New Delhi: <\/span>Sanjay Wadhwa\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s dream had the right ingredients, only his timing was wrong.<br \/>He wanted to be a pilot, like many of his generation who grew up in the Delhi of the early nineties. East-West Airlines had appeared on the horizon, Jet Airways was being launched and many other names such as ModiLuft dotted the private sector take-off path. And they all needed plenty of pilots, many times more than the handful that Indian flying schools churned out every year.<br \/>A decade and Rs 25 lakh later, Wadhwa is today a pilot without a flight plan. The 30-year-old is knocking on the doors of an aviation industry that is sinking steady with accumulated annual losses of Rs 10,000 crore.<br \/>Wadhwa is just one among the 4,000-odd unemployed commercial pilot licence (CPL) holders in India. Tariff wars, reckless expansion and a global financial slowdown that forced passengers to defer travel plans have grounded this once-sunrise sector where layoffs and employee strikes are the order of the day.<br \/>Wadhwa and his ilk now pin hopes on a government diktat to airliners to replace all foreign pilots &#8211; who make up 15-20% of all working pilots in India &#8211; by June 2010.<br \/>For airhostesses like Aditi Khedkar (name changed), fewer flights mean a change in the nature of duty. The 24-year-old Mumbai girl, employed with Kingfisher Airlines for a year, was told in August 2009 that she was being shifted to ground duty. And she quit.<br \/>India&#8217;s aviation sector, with 3 players operating full-service carriers and around 7 no-frill airlines, is harvesting the seeds of a doom it sowed during the boom years.<br \/>In the four years leading up to 2008, passenger traffic jumped by 25% every year, mainly thanks to a price war among carriers that was triggered by the entry of Air Deccan. The crew hiring peaked somewhere around 2007 and it continued till mid-2008 when Frankfinn alone placed 6,000 in cabin crew, ground staff, catering customer care et al in different airlines.<br \/><span style=\"color: rgb(153, 0, 0);\">14\/10\/09 Shreya Biswas &amp; Mahima Puri\/Economic Times<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>New Delhi: Sanjay Wadhwa\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s dream had the right ingredients, only his timing was wrong.He wanted to be a pilot, like<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indianaviationnews.net\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indianaviationnews.net\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indianaviationnews.net\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indianaviationnews.net\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indianaviationnews.net\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1045"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.indianaviationnews.net\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1045\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.indianaviationnews.net\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indianaviationnews.net\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.indianaviationnews.net\/careers\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}