State-owned carrier Air-India is reworking the agreement with its pilots to enhance its operational efficiency. The airline is looking at increasing the flight and duty time limitation to 10 hours from the current 8 hours.
"We are trying to align the agreement with that of international airlines. Currently, there is a major loss in terms of flight hours," senior Air-India officials told Business Standard.
According to the existing agreement with the 200 pilots of the Indian Pilots' Guild, the flight and duty time limitation is 8 hours. However, for pilots of all international airlines the flight time schedule is between 10 and 10-and-a-half hours.
The new flight and duty time schedule, stipulated by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation, will help the airline operate additional flights without having to hire more pilots.
The new pilots agreement would also look into the matter of rest periods.
"The agreement as it exists is heavily skewed towards the pilots. A fine-tuning to make it compatible with what exists internationally is necessary. This is definitely not a witch- hunting exercise, we will implement it only after a dialogue with the pilots," said airline executives.
The agreement will come into place once a union has been granted recognition by the Air-India management.
The airline management is not planning to touch the allowances and perquisites of the pilots as of now. The salary inclusive of perquisites of Air-India pilots is between Rs 200,000-400,000.
However, the management is planning to include a clause whereby no pilot will be given a compensation for extra training. The IPG had earlier asked for an allowance of Rs 75,000 for Instrumentation Landing System Category III training.
At present, pilots are being re-deployed only after they sign an individual undertaking which requires unionised pilots to stick to the DGCA flight and duty time limitations.
The IPG was derecognised recently after its members went on a strike over the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) scare.