New Delhi: V. Thulasidas, the chairman and managing director of Air India, the country’s state-owned international carrier, is the man in the hot seat at the ministry of civil aviation these days. Not only is he tasked with working out the details of the merger between Air India and Indian, he is expected to be the first chairman of the merged entity, which will be the fourth-largest airline in Asia.
In an exclusive interview Thulasidas talks about how critical it is for Air India and Indian to merge and keep upgrading their fleet to be able to remain in the business; plans of combining Alliance Air, a unit of Indian, and Air India Express, Air India’s international budget airline, to form a low-cost carrier with international operations to take on India’s current crop of no-frills airlines; and rationalization of overlapping routes of Air India and Indian. Excerpts from the chat:
Q: Can we talk about the big merger first?
A: There was a time when Air India was an important airline. But now there are so may other airlines. Small countries like Singapore have bigger airlines. We are the opposite of their airlines in many ways mainly because of the size and fleet that we have. We as an airline have to match the capacity and ask: do we want to survive or get completely knocked out? What is being attempted in India in terms of merger and related issues is something really big. A merger of this magnitude that is being attempted is just not important for the size but for the importance of the two companies as a national symbol. What is going to be created through it is something that is going to be very big not only in India but in Asia.
Q: How would you tackle the technical problems that you are facing with the old fleet?
A: There are times when we get criticized for the now famous ’technical snags’. We admit, we accept, we have a problem. But they occur partly because we have an old fleet but that does not mean that they are not being maintained; there has not been any major safety issue involved in it. It’s happening with new fleet of other airlines. An aircraft is only a machine at the end of the day. We talk about Indian (formerly Indian Airlines) having a hydraulic problem – that is the industry problem with this plane (A320). Airbus Indsutrie has been working on it.
Indian and Air India have the largest number of aircraft in the country and so we will have more problems when compared with other airlines. In the recent Air India technical snag, the plane landed safely it allowed passengers to disembark, after which it was towed away with the tractor for a kilometre before the nose wheel collapsed. But it was not as if that happened when the passengers were on board.
Q: So what portion of your fleet will you discard? And how many of them will be discarded this year?
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