Passengers of a cancelled Air India flight wait at Calcutta airport on Tuesday. Picture by Pradip Sanyal

May 25: “Hour of crisis” or not, anytime is strike time in Air India.

Over 20,000 Air India engineers and ground staff went on a flash strike today, grounding at least 50 flights and inconveniencing hundreds of passengers three days after one of the airline’s planes crashed and killed 158 people.

If the strike does not end during talks with the management scheduled for tomorrow morning, termination orders could be issued. “It could be leading to termination of services also,” Air India chairman Arvind Jadhav said.

Several issues are behind the strike but a key reason appears to be resentment among the engineers at the national carrier’s decision to get a Kingfisher engineer to certify an Airbus’s flightworthiness.

The wildcat strike, announced by the engineers after their union leaders where showcaused for going public with their complaints, spread to the ground staff who had for sometime been miffed with delay in payments.

“It’s absurd... they (airline staff) go on strike without any notice. Don’t they ever think of the passengers?” asked Arunima Halder, 37, who was booked on a cancelled Air India Delhi- Calcutta flight.

The union controls aircraft engineers from the erstwhile Indian Airlines and has members specialising in Airbus planes.

“One would have thought they (the staff) would be trying to work to overcome the crisis of confidence that passengers may have in flying Air India at this juncture,” said Robin Pathak, former director of Indian Airlines, referring to the Mangalore tragedy.

Air India also referred to the tragedy while appealing to the employees to call off the strike. “In this hour of crisis, the management earnestly appeals to all sections of employees to join hands to strengthen the airline and maintain high performance to show that Air India can cope up with any emergency.”

The airline also extended an “unqualified apology” to the inconvenienced passengers who included Tamil Nadu chief minister M. Karunanidhi and many from Calcutta. The chief minister, on his way from Coimbatore to Chennai, was delayed by two hours.

Air India has announced full refund for those whose flights were cancelled.

The engineers, who downed tools in the morning, were unrepentant. “They have encroached on our fundamental rights,” said Y.V. Raju, general secretary of the All India Aircraft Engineers Association, complaining of the showcause which he termed “a gag order”.

Planes cannot take off without flightworthiness certificates from licensed engineers. Air India was forced to use flight engineers from other airlines for its operations during the day.

The airline said: “The Kingfisher engineer who certified the Airbus 320 was fully qualified and was permitted to certify Air India aircraft at Mangalore by the DGCA... these bruised egos are meaningless.”

The real fight is two-fold. The engineers fear that some of their responsibilities may be outsourced in the future. They also feel that at some stage, Air India will spin off the engineering division into a separate corporation and take on a partner such as Singapore Airlines for the separate venture.

Air India had last month joined hands with ground handler Singapore Airport Terminal Services (SATS) to form a 50:50 joint venture company which will take over their three existing ground and cargo handling joint ventures in Bangalore and Hyderabad. A similar venture had been proposed with Singapore Airlines’ engineering subsidiary earlier.

Calcutta flights hit

Four flights from Calcutta — to Bagdogra, Kathmandu, Dimapur and Imphal — were cancelled while two flights to Delhi were combined into one. Air India operates 26 flights out of Calcutta everyday. A Delhi-Calcutta flight was also cancelled in the evening.

The Calcutta-Imphal flight had taken off at 11.30am from Calcutta but after flying for one hour, it returned.

“There were no engineers available (in Imphal) to provide the fit-to-fly certificate for the aircraft and so it was brought back to Calcutta,” an airline spokesperson said.

Thokchom Chanchan Devi, a national hockey player on her way to Imphal through Calcutta, said: “The flight flew for an hour. Then the pilot announced that it would return here because of the strike.”

“The airline didn’t provide any food or drinking water. We will spend the night at the airport,” she said.