Jet's Slot Factor

Even as Jet Airways stops flying to stations one after another, the question that arises is: Who gets the slots it vacates? Getting and maintaining slots nationally and internationally is a difficult proposition and till now, the beleaguered airline has been trying hard to keep its nose in the air by hanging on to the hardest to obtain airport slots around the world, as AMEYA JOSHI found out.

As Jet Airways parks one aircraft after another, the airline has been forced to pull out from route after route and station after station. From the first phase where the airline pulled the plug on operations to the North Eastern states, the second involved curtailing and shutting stations in the south of the country. The current phase has seen the airline shut many international routes which include Pune – Singapore, Mumbai – Manchester and shutting operations at Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong and Manchester in addition to frequency reduction in some international markets.

The count of operational aircraft has gone precariously low to sustain, yet the airline continues to operate its widebody aircraft to London and Amsterdam from where it works closely with Delta, Virgin Atlantic, KLM and Air France combine to feed passengers to North America.

For any airline, the critical assets have been the aircraft, hard to obtain pilots and harder to obtain airport slots at congested airports across the world. Jet Airways has majority of their aircraft leased – which also is one of the reasons why it is in this situation with lessor after lessor asking the airline to ground the aircraft since the lease rentals have not been paid. The pilots are being courted by competition: SpiceJet which operates the same type of aircraft that Jet Airways does and IndiGo which has a massive induction plan but is facing a shortage of pilots which has led to cancellation of 2 per cent of its schedule since February. This leaves Jet Airways with the third critical resource slots.