Jet Airways, yesterday, entered a holding pattern, as an emergency funding of INR 1,500 crores was approved following the exit of Naresh Goyal from the board of the airline. Jet Airways was in a downward spiral, with most of the operational fleet being grounded in the past two months. As of March 25, 2019, Jet Airways had an operational fleet of just 36 aircraft out of 114 aircraft. Here is a list of all the grounded and repossessed aircraft.
The funds will be infused this week and will be used to pay salaries of pilots, dues of lessors and other creditors such as airports and lounges. It was also mentioned somewhere that grounded aircraft will be back in the air soon. But will it be easy?
Perhaps not. As you all know, we have been keeping track of routes that are cancelled following the groundings of aircraft for quite some time now.
- Jet Airways cancels all flights to Abu Dhabi
- Jet Airways Manchester flight being withdrawn
- Jet Airways shuts down Hong Kong route and many other routes
Jet Airways has reopened booking for most of these routes. but not immediately. Let’s have a look at what the international operations for Jet Airways seem to look like in April/May 2019.
Widebody routes
Jet Airways operates a fleet of 18 widebody aircraft; 10 777-300ER, 4 A330-200 and 4 A330-300 aircraft. If you look at the list, 2 777-300ER, 2 A330-200 and 1 A330-300 aircraft are currently grounded. As of March 26, 2019, Jet Airways widebody routes for May 2019 are:
Boeing 777-300ER routes
- Daily Mumbai – Amsterdam
- Daily Mumbai – Hong Kong
- 3X daily Mumbai – London
- Daily Amsterdam – Toronto
- Daily Delhi – London
- 5x weekly Delhi – Amsterdam
- 1x weekly Delhi – Hong Kong
This schedule requires 8 Boeing 777-300ER aircraft and is an ideal usage of the fleet.
A330 routes
- Daily Mumbai – Paris
- 5x weekly Chennai – Paris
- Daily Bengaluru – Amsterdam
- 2x weekly Delhi – Amsterdam
- 6x weekly Delhi – Hong Kong
This schedule requires around 4 A330 aircraft ideally. The routes that are missing in the summer schedule, operated in the winter schedule, are Mumbai – Manchester, Mumbai – Singapore and Mumbai – Doha. I couldn’t find any domestic routes being filed for the A330 operations, so we don’t know what Jet Airways has in store for the freed up A330s.
The Mumbai – Manchester route which was cancelled, isn’t bookable yet, but Jet Airways still holds the slots at Manchester airport for the 2019 Summer schedule. They have mentioned that they are cancelling the route due to lack of aircraft.
Jet Airways slot update at Manchester airport for SS 19
Narrowbody international routes
Jet Airways cancelled a lot of narrowbody international routes especially out of Delhi which was affected the most. Jet Airways has opened up reservations for almost all routes cancelled in the past few weeks out of Mumbai. Well, we knew that would be the first step in order to protect those precious slots at Mumbai.
Jet Airways has clearly given preference to Mumbai routes as not all other international routes are bookable yet. Ongoing through Jet Airways, I could find that the following cancelled routes are not bookable even in May/June 2019,
- Daily Pune-Singapore
- 9x weekly Delhi – Abu Dhabi
- 2x Daily Bengaluru – Singapore
Jet Airways Bengaluru to Singapore
Jet Airways has opened up bookings for most of the cancelled routes from April 26, 2019. The following routes (some were cancelled altogether) will see the reduced frequency in April/May 2019,
- 3x daily Delhi – Singapore (currently 1x daily) will continue to operate 1x daily
- 5x daily Delhi – Dubai (currently 0 daily) is down to 1x daily
- 12x weekly Mumbai – Abu Dhabi (currently 0 daily) is down to 5x weekly
- 3x daily Delhi – Bangkok (currently 0 daily) is down to 2x daily in May and is further reduced to 1x daily in June
- 7x daily Mumbai – Dubai (currently operating 1x daily) will be 5x daily in May and will be back to 7x daily in June
Some routes aren’t bookable in June 2019 like 2x daily Delhi – Doha, daily Delhi – Riyadh, single daily Delhi – Dubai and so-on.
Jet Airways 2x daily Delhi to Doha in May 2019
Jet Airways Doha to Delhi in June 2019
The schedule is dynamic for now. Jet Airways may come out with a concrete plan to restore flight operations in a few days as funds start coming in.
Why not return to full-scale operations?
We already knew that Jet Airways will be redelivering a few aircraft as their leases come to an end. A few aircraft are already handed back, if you look at the table, and some more will go away perhaps.
IndiGo is facing a pilot shortage. According to reports, about 100 pilots have already moved from Jet Airways to IndiGo. As per Ajay, some A330 pilots he knew of have also shifted to IndiGo. Maybe that is the reason for reduced A330 operations. Since many A330s are on a lease, don’t know what Jet Airways has planned to do with them.
Around 260 pilots also interviewed with SpiceJet according to reports. SpiceJet and lessors were in talks to take over grounded Jet Airways aircraft. We do not know if there is a deal on this yet.SpiceJet as it is may have an abundance of crew due to the grounding of 13 737 Max aircraft. Even Vistara is hiring both Airbus and Boeing commanders at the moment.
Grounded SpiceJet 737 MAX at Delhi Airport
Jet Airways was also flying some aircraft on the Minimum Equipment List (MEL). Not all aircraft were grounded due to lessors. Some were also grounded as maintenance was due. Jet Airways has a pay by the hour (PBTH) contract for maintenance. A part of the funds will be used for carrying out maintenance on these aircraft.
VT-JEX, a 777-300ER grounded at Chennai airport since September 2018, was used as a spares pool so that other 777s in Jet Airways fleet could be kept in flying condition. VT-JWV, an A330-200 is grounded at Mumbai Airport since November 2018. Both the aircraft will take a long time and will require sufficient funds so that they can be brought to flying condition.
Bottomline
It won’t be easy for Jet Airways to return back to the normal schedule on a quick footing. Jet Airways has a lot on its plate. One of the priority items then is getting those aircraft back in the air so that flight schedules are back to normal at the earliest.
We definitely won’t see Jet Airways operating all routes from the winter schedule at the earliest, as there may perhaps be a network reduction, following redelivery of some aircraft and pilots shifting to other airlines. We don’t know what the route reduction will be in case of domestic operations yet, but are ploughing through the available data to make a picture of what may be in store.
Thanks for the Analysis.
Great analysis. Thanks for keeping us up to date.
Amazing work. Thanks for this.
One question I have though is that there is “only” an inflow of 1500 cr, when clearly the overdue amount the lessors (6-7 months) itself should be far in excess of this? Will the lessors take a haircut and start flying with Jet or maybe Jet just pays select lessors in full and starts flying the plane again?
My hunch is that the 1500 cr may only be enough for Jet to continue in it’s current state and mainly just prevent even further decline.