Is your Jet Airways flight late? Does it take too much time? Jet Airways wants to blame Airports and not their operation team. Usually, boarding time on boarding pass is before arrival time of the aircraft which has led many Frequent Flyers not to take that seriously.
A three-week long protest by Jet Airways pilots last month severely affected the airline’s punctuality. The protest against the management’s alleged failure to clear salary dues saw pilots refuse to operate flights beyond their roster. There is also a row of Expat Pilots who get more salary than Indian counterparts for flying the same flight which has irked Indian union wrong way.
Jet Airways registered the lowest on-time performance (OTP) last month with only 64 percent of its flights arriving and departing on time. Its OTP was the worst for Mumbai (56.9 percent) and Delhi (64.1 percent), which account for most of its flight operations.
Add insult to injury, Runway 29 in New Delhi has been on repair, which is the largest runway at the airport.
To make matters, even more, worse, the winter is coming which in India would be problematic. Nothern Indian sees a lot of mist/fog in winters which causes further delays as Jet has been using older aircrafts that don’t have Jet Airways have started to deploy ATR to tier 2 towns which would only add to their woes. Jet Airways is using ATR to connecting major cities such as Indore, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, New Delhi. Those are not tier 3 Airport like Bhuj, Bhavnagar, Allahabad, Jodhpur which have a smaller runway. Those airports can handle Boeing 737 easily which is a major amount of fleet that Jet Airways owns. Those turboprop takes more time to reach the destination. Example – Indore – Delhi takes 1 hour 15 mins for Boeing 737 but it takes 2 hours 10 mins on ATR.
