DYNASTY HVY

Lots of debt and unhappy staff.
Govt suspends Kingfisher Airlines' licence | Reuters


Ally

rotorhead1026

The main reason so many expats are being sent home from India is because so many Kingfisher pilots are on the street. The airline is another case of the party-animal son taking over for the business-wise father and running the operation into the ground. Actually, Kingfisher beer is doing okay AFAIK (it's difficult to screw up beer), but the airline was a mess from the start - the brainchild of an overinflated egomaniac.

bcpilot

+ 1;

It is sad that an airline, which once set the standards for good service, meet such a fate......

They hired all the Ex Air India, Indian Airlines type mgmt guys who wanted operations, systems & privleges like a govt organisation.
Efficiency & profitablity was the last prference...

Managment, upper & middle, alike was only one of the reasons of this company's demise..

The BIG BOSS & his son was another, probably the biggest single reason. No one could say NO to them.. They acted like autocrats, dictators......

Then, the big boss wanted to fly SFO - Benagaluru non stop; no one had the balls to tell him it was very difficult, if not impossible.
Biggest folly was the A340's they ordered with 3 bars in them.....

They drove the airline into the ground just to hide some mistakes.......

AGAIN Very sad.....

Hope that the last few employees will evetually get absorbed by domestic & other carriers....

bcpilot

This was another sad episode. My prayers for the family of the employee.....


Delhi: Kingfisher crisis pushes employee's wife to commit suicide : India News-IBNLive


Kingfisher staff's wife commits suicide, blames financial stress

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Very Sad Indeed....

NEW DELHI: In a shocking incident, a wife of a Kingfisher Airlines employee committed suicide.

A suicide note recovered by the police points to financial stress as the cause for the woman's suicide.

The husband is employed as an engineer in the crisis hit airlines.

"Sushmita Chakravarthy, 45, was found hanging with a ceiling fan at her south Delhi residence in Palam Thursday at 1:30 p.m.," said a police official.

CNN IBN reports that the employee was not paid salary for the past six months.

A suicide note left behind by her said that her husband has not received salary for the past four-five months, police said. Her husband Manas Chakravarthy, a retired airforce official, works as a technician in Kingfisher Airlines.

Their son studies engineering in Assam.

"Manas called his wife on her mobile phone. When she did not respond he reached his house and found her hanging," the police official added. She was depressed over financial crisis, police said.

Additional Commissioner of Police (ACP) A.P. Ojha told IANS that Sushmita was depressed over the financial crisis for the past few months. The thought of airlines becoming defunct prompted her to take this extreme step, said police.

A NDTV report says that suicide note reads: "My husband and son are very caring and I love them. My husband works with Kingfisher where they have not paid him salary for the last six months. We are in acute financial crisis and so I am committing suicide."

Meanwhile, the crisis in embattled Kingfisher Airlines escalated after talks between the company and pilots and engineers in Delhi had ended in failure as the company had not made a commitment on payment of overdue salaries.

Kingfisher, once India's second-largest airline, is more than half a year behind on salary payments and has grounded its fleet since Monday after a protest by engineers over the weekend turned violent. Talks with employees in Mumbai on Wednesday ended in a stalemate.

"Employees demanded payment of long pending salary (seven months) prior to resuming operations. All employees expressed their keenness to resume work provided their dues are cleared expeditiously," the group of unidentified employees in Delhi said in a statement on Thursday.

The shutdown has further dimmed the outlook for the airline controlled by liquor baron Vijay Mallya. Kingfisher, which has never turned a profit since its founding in 2005, is saddled with $1.4 billion in debt, owed mostly to government banks led by State Bank of India.

FLSTCI

I knew Sanjay Aggarwal from his tenure at Flight Options. That a concern he was involved with had economic difficulties is regrettably no surprise.

rotorhead1026

I agree fully, but the place was doomed well before he showed up. My guess is (honestly I didn't know he had surfaced at Kingfisher until a couple of weeks ago) he just skimmed off a big salary and rode the wave as long as he could. He was at SpiceJet while I was there - the new improved Spice management apparently tossed him as soon as they moved in ... he does what he does.

chazbird

I flew for KFA and I while I was there I thought: the equipment was good to excellent (mostly new) and very well maintained; The service was very good to sometimes excellent; Most of the time we were on time. We had high load factors, and for awhile either carried the highest percentage of pax in the country or were consistently the second highest, and people seemed to like flying on "us". How they did this I do not know because behind the scenes it was absolute chaos! (And I've been/lived in India before, this was unique even for what's normal there) However, the company bled money all the time. Some say the Deccan merger was the reason, or the this or that, but with the loads we carried I couldn't help thinking maybe there was some high level siphoning.

rotorhead1026

Chaz, they just weren't charging enough, especially to support that level of service. They were already in trouble when they picked up Deccan; they DID pay way too much for that operation.

I'm glad you posted. Whatever KFA's financial problems, I heard nothing bad about safety or maintenance. The times I flew them service was good. That may well have changed in the last year or so.

I knew a couple of people who left Spice because KFA paid a lot more. Most of the youngsters assumed the beer company would cover the airline's red ink. Very naive ... and I warned 'em.

bcpilot

So both of you have tasted India & seen KFA.

Yes the planes, the product, the service, the FA's, everything was excellent, the planes were full, load factors were high, fares were also great, but it doesn't matter how much they made, they had no control on spending....

Corrupt practices in management couple with autocratic attitude of the big boss played a big role. The guys who ever wanted to speak up & offer a better suggestion, were hushed up & intimidated....
Later on, everyone just kept to them selves, & just went with the flow to milk the cow while it lasted....